Also, while writing it, I had this great Mekons song on repeat in my head, and often in my headphones as well:

‘Unruly Unionism’ in Cold War America

Book review by Jonathan Kissam

In the March 5, 1957 issue of the UE NEWS, UE Washington Representative Russ Nixon reported that “a new broad attack of serious proportions is being launched against the entire labor movement.” The first item listed by Nixon in his outline of “this new anti-labor drive” was the “Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field,” generally known as the McClellan Committee after its chair, Senator John McClellan, a right-wing Democrat from Arkansas.

Unlike previous Congressional investigations which had contributed to the near-destruction of UE and other militant unions, the McClellan Committee’s target was corruption, not so-called “communist domination.” There was, undeniably, corruption in the labor movement at the time, including in the Teamsters union, which was the main target of the McClellan Committee and its chief prosecutor, a young Robert F. Kennedy, fresh out of Harvard Law School. However, as UE’s General Executive Board warned in a statement issued in the next issue of the UE NEWS:

The purpose of the Senate labor investigation is to smear and discredit all labor and to prepare the way for further legislation in the line of the Taft-Hartley and Brownell-Butler Laws, to bring the labor movement another step on the road toward a labor front—a labor movement controlled by McCarthyite politicians for the benefit of Big Business.

The McClellan hearings are the subject of the second chapter of a fascinating new book by historian and one-time UE activist Ryan Patrick Murphy. (While in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Murphy was active in the 2004-05 UE campaign to organize graduate workers there.) In Teamsters Metropolis, he argues not only that the McClellan hearings targeted the Teamsters because they were, at the time, the fastest-growing union in the country, but also that the committee’s broader goal was “the regulation of working people’s bodies.” An historian of sexuality as well as labor, Murphy also finds in the history of the Teamsters a history of resistance to the work discipline and compulsory heterosexual monogamy that characterized Cold War America.

An Early “Union for Everyone”

Labor historians tend to be drawn to heroic stories, stories of rank-and-file workers righteously battling with greedy bosses, whether those battles end in triumphant victory or tragic loss. It is why UE and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) are among the most-studied unions in the American labor movement, and why the UE NEWS has in the past included articles on the history of other militant CIO unions like the Marine Cooks and Stewards, the Food, Tobacco and Allied Workers, and Mine, Mill.

However, most American workers have been, and remain, in unions that are full of contradictions. Many American unions have been democratic, militant, and/or progressive in some ways, while being bureaucratic, corrupt, and/or reactionary in others. There is value in studying the history of these unions as well. While Teamsters Metropolis has few clear heroes, it tells us a lot about how workers in mid-century America secured decent wages and union conditions in industries outside of basic manufacturing, maintained ties to their immigrant pasts, and protected their right to pleasure in the face of a culture that pushed workers to work ever harder for the boss’s profit.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters grew faster than any other union in the 1950s, with a million workers joining the IBT over the course of that decade. Most of those workers were outside the union’s traditional jurisdiction of truck drivers, and by the time of the McClellan hearings, the Teamsters were a sort of “union for everyone,” encompassing workers in light manufacturing, warehousing, and a variety of retail and service industries. Teamsters members could be found in restaurants, bakeries, beauty salons, and liquor stores; they washed cars, maintained jukeboxes and pinball machines, and worked at dozens if not hundreds of other occupations.

Murphy writes that the union’s most dynamic organizer (and most infamous member), Jimmy Hoffa, who became the union’s general president in 1957, “recognized that while large-scale manufacturing was the core of the midwestern economy, hundreds of thousands of people still worked in mom-and-pop shops on every city block. The unceasing volatility of those small businesses was, in Hoffa’s mind, an organizing opportunity, one that would help him build a larger, stronger social movement that would touch people not just at work, but in the places where they washed their cars, bought their bread, drank their beer, and sang and danced after a hard day on the job.”

Hoffa’s success in pursuing this vision created what Murphy calls the “Teamsters Metropolis”: mid-century cities in which Teamsters union contracts allowed workers in these industries to move to “quiet, verdant, spacious suburban landscapes” like their counterparts in auto, steel, and electrical manufacturing, but also “[kept] them connected to the heterogeneous, tumultuous spaces of their parents’ and grandparents’ central city neighborhoods.”

Challenging Cold War Culture With “Unruly Unionism”

Murphy describes the mid-century Teamsters as a social and cultural movement that challenged “the suburban culture at the center of US Cold War planning.” That culture held that working people should work hard and obey their bosses at work, abandon any identification with their immigrant pasts, and live in monogamous, heterosexual nuclear families in single-family homes in the suburbs.

Although many Teamsters members did indeed move to the suburbs, they belonged to a union that practiced what Murphy calls “unruly unionism.” Teamsters leaders were big, brash, and loud, and often threatened bosses not just with pickets or strikes, but physical violence against their property or person. Organizing in industries that were characterized by lots of small shops, the Teamsters rarely relied on National Labor Relations Board elections, instead preferring to convince bosses through more direct means that it was in their best interest to recognize the union. Murphy quotes the testimony of a Teamsters local president during the McClellan hearings about an organizer he used to work with:

He would just walk into the shop and pull the switch and say “Everybody out on strike.” That is all there was to it. Everybody thought he was crazy and they would walk out and the boss would sign a contract. ... [H]e organized many shops by the same method.

Not only did the Teamsters’ unruliness threaten suburban decorum, the union’s culture also, according to Murphy, provided an alternative to the discipline of the work ethic. Following scholar Kathi Weeks, Murphy writes that “to remake the world in such a way that upends work’s discipline, workers must engage in living sensuous activity that produces physical gratification ... that is far more pleasurable than work.” In a chapter titled “Invested in Pleasure,” he reads Hoffa’s investment of union pension funds in hotels, retirement communities, and vacation homes for union members as just such “an antiwork political practice”:

Robust new Teamster contracts allowed rank-and-file union members to work less, shortening the work year with more weeks of paid vacation, and shortening the work life with a pension program that allowed workers to retire earlier. ... And by subsidizing sunny Miami afternoons under palm fronds that blew in the wind, Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters union incited pleasure, opening a space for living sensuous activity that rejuvenated the body rather than exhausting it.

Young Workers of Color Take On Union Racism

The contracts the Teamsters won in the 1950s provided access to middle-class incomes and lifestyles for a membership who were mostly eastern and southern European immigrants and their children. But not all Teamsters had access to the union’s “investment in pleasure.” By the end of the decade, many Teamsters locals had “signed collusive contracts with eastern and southern European small business owners that forced Black and Brown workers to pay union dues while earning minimum wage, receiving no benefits, and working mandatory overtime without any pay.”

Murphy explores this darker side of the Teamsters in a chapter titled “What Are We Paying Dues For? Young Workers of Color Confront the Teamsters Metropolis.” Young Black and Latino workers arriving in the same cities where Hoffa had built his union, their confidence bolstered by the victories of the civil rights movement, sought the same access to power and pleasure that eastern and southern European immigrants had fought for earlier in the decade. But instead of joining the Teamsters union, they left it.

In the late 50s and early 60s, workers of color in urban areas across the country, fed up with collusive racist contracts, left the Teamsters and other do-nothing unions, often striking or threatening to strike if their boss did not end his relationship with the Teamsters and recognize another, more democratic union. (Although Murphy does not mention UE, many such workers leaving corrupt or do-nothing unions joined UE during this period, including the workers at M. Chasen & Sons in Irvington, NJ, who were members of Local 155 from 1963 until their shop closed last year.)

In New York City especially, Murphy writes, this led to “a new wave of union militancy,” including citywide strikes in the lamp, garment, and healthcare industries. As Murphy points out, the Teamsters’ embrace of racist collusion, although it provided money for the union’s coffers, was a strategic mistake. “Absent solidarity with the new generation, the Teamsters’ once-unstoppable expansion withered at the outset of a new decade, which compromised its ability to seize the revolutionary potential of the new social movements of the 1960s.”

Gender and Sexuality in the Teamsters Union

The final chapter of the book, “What If We Had Known About Sylvia Pagano?”, makes the argument that “[w]hile monogamous heterosexual marriage, the suburban single-family home, the husband breadwinner, and the dependent wife were ideals that distributed money and power to many rank-and-file Teamsters ... Jimmy Hoffa’s network of comrades and kin refused to conform to those expectations.”

Throughout the book, Murphy highlights a number of ways in which Teamsters and other union members in the 1950s used labor activism as a way to live outside of conventional heterosexual domesticity. In his epilogue he notes that underworld associates of the Teamsters provided capital for much of New York City’s gay nightlife establishments in the 1950s and 1960s, including the famous Stonewall Inn.

But it is Sylvia Pagano, the subject of the final chapter, who steals the show. Pagano was a skilled union organizer and confidant of Hoffa who served as one of the key links between the Teamsters and the various ethnic syndicates commonly referred to as “organized crime” or “the mob.” (Although beyond the scope of this review, Murphy’s book includes a fascinating and nuanced take on the Teamsters’ relationship with the underground economy.) This provided Pagano with an income and mobility that allowed her to live a rich, independent, cosmopolitan life as a single woman, an unusual feat at the time.

Drawing on transcripts of a bug that the FBI planted in her Detroit apartment, Murphy paints a picture of Pagano living in what he calls “queer domesticity.” In an era in which women were expected to be dependent on a husband and spend most of their time in the home, Pagano’s life was instead filled with friends, lovers, and business associates, whom she frequently entertained at her apartment. She was especially close to Hoffa’s wife, and the Hoffas often watched her son while she was traveling on the union’s behalf.

In the conclusion of the chapter, Murphy urges “today’s labor activists to revisit Sylvia Pagano and others who fall outside the conventional paradigms for historical representation, as the cultural complexity of their business enterprises, their political mobilization, their friendships, their intimacies, and their desires has much to teach us.”

“A newer, queerer understanding of labor’s past”

In his 1994 book Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, historian George Lipsitz makes the argument that the utopian impulses of the 1940s labor movement, once expressed openly through militant strike activity but suppressed during the Cold War, went “underground” into popular culture, informing everything from roller derby to rock and roll. Murphy does not reference Lipsitz’s book or argument, but it is easy to see his pleasure-seeking Teamsters as a similar manifestation of working-class rebellion in an era when explicitly political dissidence could result in blacklisting, deportation, or even jail time. Indeed, Robert F. Kennedy thought that the Teamsters were as much of a threat to the Cold War order as UE had been considered in the 1940s, titling his book about the McClellan hearings The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee’s Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions.

Murphy is making an historical argument about working-class culture, and such arguments are always difficult to prove conclusively, especially when they concern private matters such as sexuality. He writes that Teamsters activists in the 1950s and 60s “struggled over the meaning of their race, gender, sexuality, and class even as they lacked the language to articulate those dilemmas.” Whether because they lacked the language or simply did not write their thoughts down, his subjects left few written records of what they thought, so reconstructing their worldview is as much a work of imagination as investigation.

And, it must be said, most of the “labor activists” profiled in Teamsters Metropolis are officials and operatives like Hoffa and Pagano. While the union clearly gave such individuals access to (often luxurious) suburban living while maintaining a connection to the culture of the center city, it is unclear to what degree rank-and-file members experienced their union in this way.

Still, Murphy’s efforts towards excavating “a newer, queerer understanding of labor’s past” demonstrate that cultural ideas about the supposed value of hard work, and about suburban heterosexual marriage as the only acceptable form of domestic arrangement, were challenged even in outwardly conservative institutions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

At the end of the book, Murphy writes:

Hoffa and his peers recognized that for the overwhelming majority of workers, toil makes people’s bodies feel pain, hunger, anxiety, fear, and boredom. Labor activism had to be about reversing those negative sensations, which would allow workers to experience pleasure, safety, satiation, and contentment in their lives.

Comparing the Teamsters with the gay bathhouses funded by their underworld associates, he notes that both “delivered fleeting pleasures in a painful world,” and concludes that, “That unruly endeavor, the commitment to providing gratification for marginal workers who found so little comfort in the mid-twentieth century, is the most enduring contribution of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to the US labor movement.”

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Teamsters Metropolis is published by the University of Michigan Press, and can be purchased as a paperback, hard cover, or e-book from their website.

I was flipping through the menu from a state dinner my parents attended in the early 1970s, leather pages bound together into a small codex. The name of each dish was hand-written on its own page in a careful script, black marker on the maroon leather, and a small physical token of the dish was attached with thread: a dried navy bean for the soup, a small ceramic chicken for the entree, pearls of tapioca for the dessert.

The rich kids were leaving stacks of quarters everywhere as gifts for the workers, then getting upset when the workers did not immediately put down what they were doing to collect them.

The rich parents were upset that the middle class parents of their children’s college friends hadn’t give their sons and daughters the same advantages.

I started writing a set of theses which began “The logic of capitalism...”

There were large black beetles everywhere, which would dissolve into clouds of gnats when I approached and then re-form when I withdrew.

I was a spirit, flying through a mall, possessing people like a methamphetamine rush or accelerationist philosophy. The mall might have been in Princeton, New Jersey, or it might have been in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I made a series of bad decisions, and I didn’t even enjoy myself while doing so.

I had been wearing a blue button-up shirt over my t-shirt, just one button done, for days, and decided maybe it was time for a new, clean shirt.

I started writing a set of theses which began “The logic of addiction...”

I went to go for a run in the snow but instead I built a snowman, with ears on top, like a teddy bear. Then the snowplows came through and pushed all the snow off the streets onto the curb strip and buried it and all you could see were the ears.

There was a box of pencils, most of which were broken in half, and a box of pens, most of which were not mine. But I still wrote things down.

I was so exhausted I couldn’t wait to get to sleep, but then I found my dreams more exhausting than my waking life.

I was looking through the bins at a record store in Liverpool, trying to find the blues records brought over by American sailors, but all I could find were shellac discs of the songs they sung on the picket lines during the 1907 Music Hall Strike.

I was trying to pack a turntable into my suitcase for a transatlantic flight.

I was trying to decide which of my black-and-red t-shirts with revolutionary slogans was least likely to get me pulled out of the customs line and interrogated when I tried to get back into the country.

I was trying to get back to a place I once belonged, a Midwestern college town on a river, with modern institutional buildings on campus and aging art deco buildings downtown. But couldn’t find it on the map anymore.

Every morning I wake up with fleeting memories of different lives, some unsettling, some bittersweet. They dissipate as the daylight swells, and all I’m left with is this dream journal.

Filed under: Stories

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As I did last summer, I am planning to take August off from regular posting here. The discipline of writing a weekly newsletter has been good for me in many ways, but my middle-class Calvinist superego sometimes uses it as an excuse to load a bit more guilt onto my aging shoulders than is healthy. I’ve been writing a lot for work, including drafting an officers’ statement on the recent ICE killings, and I’ve got another couple of longer piece to write over the next two weeks, so I’m a bit tapped out.

In addition to using the break to read more actual printed books, like I did last summer, I’m also hoping to complete some longer pieces that have been in the hopper for a while, and maybe spend some time doing visual art and/or making music. If you like, you can follow what I’m reading on Goodreads, and if I make any art worth sharing, I’ll probably post it on Instagram and Threads. You can find me on any of these platforms at, you guessed it, @domesticleft.

See you Labor Day weekend!

Conservatism, in Robin’s telling, emerged primarily in response to the French Revolution. One could certainly argue that the democratic impulses unleashed by the American Revolution — or the English Civil War a century earlier, or for that matter the Reformation — also scared the hell out of elites, but it was really the French who put the idea of the divine right of kings to rest for good.

This put the defenders of hierarchy and submission, for centuries if not millennia buttressed by a sort of metaphysical “common sense,” in a bit of a bind. Forced into contesting for power in polities that have been at least quasi-democratic, conservatives — to use modern terminology — sought to “rebrand” their political positions, not as a defense of hereditary privilege (though this is in most cases what they are in practice), but as a defense of excellence. As Robin writes:

This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his way subscribes to this typical statement, from the nineteenth century, of the conservative creed: “To obey a real superior ... is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting.”

“Excellence” is, in the conservative imagination, demonstrated not by being “excellent” to other human beings, but by dominating other human beings, through capitalist competition, or, even better, war.

As Robin explains, what we have now come to call “right-wing populism” has always been a feature of conservative thought, albeit not always expressed quite as crudely. Our modern Burke wannabes are more likely to valorize “strength” than “excellence” (though Trump is certainly partial to invoking the “beautiful” as well), but the deal on offer to members of the subordinate classes is essentially the same: by obeying a real superior (in politics, Trump; at work, your boss), you get to, in turn, expect obedience and deference from those you feel you are superior to (your underlings at work; your wife and children at home; your social inferiors — people of color, queer people, and immigrants — in the public sphere).

This is all, I think, fairly obvious when you look at the American right; one virtue that MAGA does possess is that they certainly say the quiet parts out loud. (After Trump was elected, Robin wrote a new introduction to the second edition of his book; it was marketed, at least in some quarters, as “the book that predicted Trump.”) But there is often a parallel dynamic in liberal/progressive spaces. Except it valorizes not the higher orders of society, but the middle orders, and instead of obedience, the coin of the realm is protection.

In so many activist and progressive spaces, I find that the people who are loudest about “using privilege to protect the most marginalized” are the most likely to, when they face any kind of challenge, expect some authority to step in and make everything better, to protect them from any perceived injustice.

While this kind of behavior is relatively rare on an obvious personal level (and most common among people with the most privilege), ambitions to be a savior on the one hand, and expectations to be able to appeal to a savior on the other, are deeply embedded in the culture of contemporary social justice politics, which has been incubated in the same elite educational institutions that bred conservative thought in earlier times. “Allies” strive to demonstrate their allyship by naming “problematic” behavior, and then expect that the very naming of such behavior as racist, sexist, ableist, etc. (or even just “problematic”) will spur some authority to do something about it.

Needless to say, both of these hierarchical dynamics, the conservative one of obedience and the liberal one of protection, are deeply corrosive to the basic ideals of the labor movement. In his 2022 book Class Struggle Unionism,1 Joe Burns differentiates the eponymous form of unionism he is calling for (and which my union, UE, exemplifies) both from “business unionism” and from what he calls “labor liberalism.”

Business unionism is probably the more familiar term to most people. It refers to the types of unions which stick to “bread and butter” issues like wages and benefits and which are “run like businesses” — and, as businesses, generally accept management’s right to manage (in other words, workers’ obligation to obey management) and the capitalist system more broadly. They also tend to be politically conservative, undemocratic, and top-down; these are the kinds of unions that have produced the stereotype of the cigar-chomping “union boss.”

Labor liberals, in Burns’ telling, “adopt the progressive political views of the middle-class social movements but reject the traditional workplace organization and concerns of both traditional [business] unionism and class struggle unionism.” Instead of the “rank-and-file self-liberation” valued by class struggle unionists, “labor liberalism offered instead tightly choreographed workers’ struggles, a dominant role for staff organizers, and an orientation towards passing protective labor legislation.”

When doing some research for work last week, I came across a brief section of a speech made by Henry Wallace, who ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket. Wallace, who served in the Roosevelt administration and was his vice president during his third term, was the most prominent national representative of the left wing of the New Deal coalition, which stood for strong unions, civil rights, and cooperation with the Soviet Union. His campaign for president, and the founding of the short-lived Progressive Party, was in reaction to the rise of a cold-war liberalism which sought to tame worker militancy and class struggle unionism, to purge Communists and other radicals, and to incorporate the labor movement and other social movements into a bureaucratic, liberal state.

At at a campaign rally in Harlem, Wallace declared:

Our party is a party of workers and farmers, independent businessmen and professionals. It is a party of all races, religious faiths and national origins, dedicated to overcoming the problems of differences, not to perpetuating those differences.

I was struck by the phrase “overcoming the problems of differences,” because in contemporary liberal culture, difference, at least at a surface level, is usually treated as something to be celebrated — and if one points out any problems that may come from differences, one quickly becomes labeled as a problem.

In bureaucratic organizations which manage and suppress conflict rather than surface it (as a class struggle union does), there is no common, democratic space for people to work out their differences. Indeed, this is part of why class struggle unionism puts such a premium on democracy. If you recognize that your power as a union comes from the workers, not the staff or leaders, you have got to give those workers — who in many workplaces will have wildly different backgrounds, and in almost all workplaces will have wildly different ideas — a space to work out, together, the problems of their differences.

In 2009, during the rise of the Tea Party, when Democratic politicians across the country were cancelling public appearances for fear of being heckled by organized mobs ginned up about “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act and such like, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders held a series of town hall meetings in some of the most conservative areas of the state.

As I wrote at the time for MRZine:

Instead of defensively trying to clarify that the Obama reforms are neither the single-payer system nor government-run healthcare that the right wing calls them, Sanders challenged the audience on these points, asking how many people would want to get rid of Medicare, “a single-payer system,” or the Veterans’ Administration, a system of “government-run healthcare.” (Only a few people raised their hands.)

But perhaps even more important than the fact that Bernie challenged right-wing talking points about government was the fact that he took his critics in the audience seriously. He let them speak, he listened respectfully, and then he explained why he disagreed, and, when they were factually wrong, he pointed that out. In other words, he treated them like adults, expecting neither obedience nor to be treated as a savior.

Following the 2024 election, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez polled her followers on social media, asking for the perspective of people who voted for both her and Trump. (She received 68.9 of the vote, while Trump secured 33 percent in her district. Mathematically, at least 1.9 percent of those who voted voted for both.) “I actually want to learn from you, I want to hear what you were thinking,” she wrote on X.2

This is why, as one of my mentors in the labor movement is fond of saying, quoting William Z Foster, “the left wing must do the work.” Bernie and AOC, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and class struggle unions like UE, are all part of a political tradition that, at its best, sees the people — all of the people, with all of their problematic differences — as the agents of their own liberation, neither as inferiors to be dominated nor as victims to be saved. Dealing with the problems of differences, surfacing conflict and resolving it through honest debate, is never easy, but, as we can see when we look around us at a country polarized between would-be superiors and would-be saviors, it is better than the alternative.

Filed under: Politics

Caesar was a skilled orator, and was drawn to politics, but he was even more skilled in war. He conquered Gaul, all three parts of it, and then crossed the English Channel to subdue the Britons. 177 years later, one of his successors would build a wall across the entire width of the island to secure the Empire’s northern border.

Caesar was a relentless self-promoter, but a talented one. His Commentaries on the Gallic War were recognized as a great literary achievement as soon as they were published, and helped spread his fame. In 44 BC, he had himself declared dictator for life.

Months later, he was assassinated by a group of senators, but republican “virtue,” so beloved of our own founders, was mortally wounded. Thirteen years later his great-nephew and heir Octavian would proclaim himself emperor, taking the name Augustus and the title “Caesar,” from which we get the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. The Roman Empire lasted for five centuries — or nearly 15 if you count its successor Byzantine empire based in Constantinople.

In the opening sentences of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx writes, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Marx is comparing Louis Bonaparte, who had himself declared Emperor of France as Napoleon III in 1852, with his uncle (the Napoleon), but in an unpublished novel from 1837 Marx used a similar formulation, writing:

Every giant ... presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine. ... The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain. ... Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus.

Nowadays, of course, it is just farce all the way down. Or rather, that particular amalgam of farce and cruelty which binds like lime and clay to form the ugly but surprisingly durable edifices of our society.

But history need not only run in one direction. Thirteen years and ten days after a group of wealthy white men, many of whom held other human beings in chattel slavery, met in Philadelphia to declare “All men are created equal,” the people of Paris, led by the rough workmen known as sans-culottes, stormed the Bastille. Their revolution, for a republic of “liberty, equality, and brotherhood,” may have had a tragic end, but at least they meant what they said.

Filed under: History

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Gentle readers, it has been a long week of newsing and editing for this UE NEWS Editor, which is why, instead of a long, thoughtful essay about the 59th Carnegie International, this week’s newsletter is ... well, whatever the above is. But all that work did produce two articles worth sharing.

First, my colleague Karl Zimmerman, UE’s Research Director, wrote a fantastic feature on “AI and the Working Class,” in which he explores the economic, environmental, and cultural impacts of this technology on our society. A couple of highlights:

Gen Z college students, seeing dire working prospects upon graduation, are forming “Luddite” clubs across the nation.

and:

AI isn’t for you, it’s for your boss.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the AI pitch is “every man a CEO.” Instead of doing work, you have a personal assistant who follows your commands to exacting precision. They never talk back, never tell you your idea is a bad one, and never ask for more money and better working conditions.

and:

Silicon Valley has become its own strange self-referential creature, with ideologies percolating through it which get little coverage in the wider press. These go well beyond the typical rapacious capitalism of the ownership class, with a strange, quasi-religious millenarianism having overtaken many tech CEOs over the past two decades.

Second, since I am my father’s son (he taught Constitutional Law), I got a little carried away with writing a summary of the recent Supreme Court term. If that interests you, you can read it here. It owes a significant analytical debt to (whose Substack you should be reading if you aren’t already).

From my own Substack subscriptions, here are a couple of pieces on the recent holiday that are all a bit more positive than my usual dour takes:1

(who, for my UE family, is the daughter of Ernest “The Train” Thompson), has a nice piece about how the Declaration of Independence introduced a “different idea” that served as a “North Star” for people (especially enslaved people) seeking freedom. She also makes a nice connection to a recent story “about a small town in Quebec voting to establish the rights of trees”:

Health, Society and a Little K-drama

Monday's Book: Our Declaration

When I started writing “Monday’s Book” as a regular feature of my Substack, I thought I would write about a book I was reading that week. Some times one book linked to another so I wrote about two. Or a book and a show. But this past month there has been so much to read about the…

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2 months ago · 1 like · 4 comments · Mindy Fullilove

wrote a really sharp post last week about the photo we’ve all seen going around of the young Black woman on the DC Metro surrounded by masked Proud Boys:

Everything is Liminal

She didn't ask for this

What I’ll remember about this year’s fourth of July weekend is not the gross display of carpet bombing fireworks in our nation's capital. Nor the stifling 100 degree temps that descended on NYC and trapped heat in its tall canyons of concrete. It wasn’t even the sudden onset of a spectacular thunderstorm that whipped through like a hurricane and shook the trees as if they were made of paper. It lasted all of thirty minutes before the furious storm moved on, leaving a fiery sunset and a rainbow in its wake…

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2 months ago · 100 likes · 39 comments · Jenna Park

And published a formally brilliant and strangely affecting piece on the American presidency:

Tropical Depression

No more shall tyrants here

The following sentences come from 45 different Wikipedia pages. I have removed proper nouns and occasionally made minor alterations for clarity, but none that change the meaning of the original sentence. Otherwise, all the text is verbatim…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · David Ramsey

My dreams of becoming a rock-and-roll star had collapsed, leaving me with just the shitty fast-food job I had taken to support myself while pursuing them. I was living in a depressing basement apartment with my soon-to-be-ex drummer, and had broken up with two girlfriends in fairly quick succession. So I jumped at the chance to fly to Europe, where the rest of my family was living for a semester, while my father exchange-taught at the University of Vienna.

When I had gone looking for a job the summer after I graduated from high school, there weren’t a lot on offer. (It was a recession, after all.) I ended up working at the same fast-food restaurant as the drummer in my band, no doubt thanks to him recommending me. I made four dollars an hour, twenty cents above minimum wage; when the federal minimum wage was increased to $4.25 on April 1, 1991, that differential disappeared. (Of course, $4.25 in 1991 works out to $10.53 in 2026 dollars, well above the current federal minimum wage of $7.25.) I slung burgers and fried fries, wiped down tables and cleaned bathrooms, took orders and made milkshakes, and dispensed gallons upon gallons of colas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup into 32-ounce plastic cups.

I could not say, when I showed my newly-acquired passport to customs officials at Heathrow en route to Austria, that I was especially proud to be an American.

Last weekend I went to my first, and probably my last, multi-day outdoor rock-and-roll music festival. Organized by the band Wilco, Solid Sound is held every other year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts, and lasts for three days. What enticed me to make the schlep to Western Massachusetts, spend more money than I am comfortable with, and endure the logistical hassles that come with this kind of event, was the promise of a once-in-a-lifetime performance: seeing Wilco and the British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg perform songs from their series of Mermaid Avenue albums.

In 1995, Nora Guthrie, daughter of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, approached Bragg about (re-)setting to music the lyrics of songs that her father had written but never recorded; since all he had written down were the lyrics, any melodies and accompaniments he might have composed for them are lost to time.1 Bragg then recruited Wilco — who, at the time, had only put out two albums — as collaborators, presumably to give the songs a more American feel, and they wrote and recorded what ultimately became three album’s worth of songs in 1997 and 1998, in Dublin and Chicago.

There are certainly some political songs on the albums: “All You Fascists,” from Vol. II, is exactly the kind of lyric you might expect from a songwriter who famously wrote “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar. Most of these are sung by Bragg, whose commitment to socialist politics can occasionally seem to overwhelm his music.

But the majority of the lyrics are far more quirky and personal than Guthrie’s most famous songs, “This Land Is Your Land” and “Union Maid,” might lead you to think. They show off his penchant for wordplay and humor, contain a not insignificant amount of sexual innuendo, and are often suffused with the kind of poetic yearning — for a lover, for a landscape, or for a better future — which made them a particularly good match for Wilco’s brand of impressionistic Americana.

The albums won all kinds of recognition, but Wilco and Bragg had never performed the songs together live. They are both among my favorite artists — prior to last weekend, I had seen each of them perform four times, separately — so I was not going to miss this show.

During the months I lived in Vienna, I read a lot. I had, to be honest, little else to do. The law professor in whose apartment we were staying — the exchange program included an exchange of domiciles as well as teaching positions — was fluent in four languages, so there were a fair number of books in English on the bookshelves that lined the walls of her apartment. I had also brought some books with me, and I think we might have had access to an English-language library of some kind as well. (Austria is one of the most English-fluent countries on the European continent, with everyone mandated to study it for something like six or eight years in school. I was completely unable to use my high-school German because when I tried to speak it, people would just respond in English.)

One of the books I read while in Vienna was Woody Guthrie: A Life, written in 1980 by Joe Klein, then a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. It was the first full-length biography of the singer, and the only one that had been written at that time.

Klein’s account of Guthrie’s life was my first introduction to what Vivian Gornick famously called “the romance of American communism.” The general consensus is that Guthrie never actually joined the Communist Party (CPUSA),2 but he was certainly a fellow traveler — his songs usually supported the party’s political positions, and for the better part of 1939, he wrote a column for the party’s paper, the Daily Worker.

Guthrie joined the Communist orbit, if not the party, in the mid-30s, at the height of the “Popular Front.” During this period, the CPUSA, and communist parties around the world, sought to build the widest possible coalition against fascism, uniting not only with other socialists and leftists but with mainstream liberals as well. In the American context, this meant supporting the New Deal, and indeed Communists and others close to the party were important to the intellectual, cultural, and political currents which shaped the New Deal; some even served in government.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Communists played a key role in building the great industrial unions of the CIO — not only the ones that would come to be seen as “left-led” like UE and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, but also the Mineworkers, the Steelworkers, the Auto Workers and dozens of smaller unions. CPUSA members were dedicated and skilled organizers, and were at least begrudgingly accepted in most CIO unions until the onset of the Cold War in the late 40s.

My politics were already firmly socialist by this point (I think I joined DSA in 1989 or 1990), but until I read Klein’s book I had no idea that socialists and communists had played any significant role in U.S. history. My cultural-historical allegiances began to shift from the 1960s counterculture, which had informed a lot of my teenage years, to the Popular Front and the New Deal, where in many ways they still lie.

MASS MoCA opened in 1999 on the site, and in the buildings, of the former Sprague Electric factory in North Adams.3 Nestled in among the Berkshire Mountains, which rise like slumbering giants in all directions, North Adams was once a booming mill town. Its population at the 2020 census was 12,961, but a hundred and twenty-five years ago, in its heyday, it had a population of almost twice that, at a time when the overall U.S. population was less than a quarter of what it is now.

The whole Hoosac Valley, in which North Adams sits, is filled with old brick mill buildings, most of them old textile mills. Some have been repurposed for housing or commercial uses but many are still abandoned. The 27 buildings which makes up MASS MoCA were originally built in the last quarter of the 19th century to house a textile printing business, which grew to become the largest in the country. When the textile industry abandoned New England in the middle of the 20th century, Sprague Electric, a manufacturer of capacitors, took over the sprawling complex.

Sprague Electric closed its doors in the mid-80s, which proved a devastating blow to the local economy. The museum and, arguably, the every-other-year festival, have brought a certain measure of economic vitality back to the town, but it still bears the telltale marks of deindustrialization. It has a Dollar Tree and a Dollar General within a couple of blocks of each other, not on the edge of town but right on either side of the city center. I don’t remember seeing any empty storefronts downtown, but there were at least two occupied by what were essentially junk shops, and two others which were being rented as galleries for the art department of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, a public college with an enrollment of under 1,000. Charming, but not exactly the sign of a healthy local economy.

For about two months, I lived with my parents and my sister in a small but gracious apartment near the center of Vienna, sipped espressos and cappuccinos (then barely known in the States) in elegant cafes, and went to the opera. We took trips to Salzburg, to Prague, to Italy. Then we ended our European spring with another month traveling around Europe on a Eurail pass — Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Ireland, Wales, and England.

And as the days and weeks passed, I found myself actually missing my home country, and not just the cities I was excited to visit as a teenager, Chicago and New York and San Francisco, but the Midwest I had grown up in, its vast plains and big sky, its spaciousness and plainness and slower pace.

And also its openness, its optimism, its wildness, especially as compared to Europe. The fact that it could produce a Woody Guthrie. I doubt I knew the phrase at the time, unless it was mentioned in Klein’s book, but I was coming around to the idea, popularized by Earl Browder, chair of the CPUSA during the Popular Front period, that “Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism.”

The Solid Sound headline performances take place on a stage set up in “Joe’s Field,” which abuts the railroad tracks which once, presumably, brought in raw materials to the factory and carried out capacitors and other electronic components.

About halfway through the Mermaid Avenue set, a train came rattling along the tracks. Pausing in between songs, Wilco’s singer, songwriter and front man Jeff Tweedy came to the microphone and said something to the effect of “Woody would have wanted us to stop and listen.” Bragg stepped up to his microphone and said, “No, Woody would have jumped the train!”

On Sunday morning, walking from the campsite to the museum for the last day of the festival, I saw a couple of the town’s current residents stumbling aimlessly across the railroad tracks, the way one often sees people in the thrall of drug addiction or untreated mental health issues crossing city streets against the light, as if daring the transportation system to simply take them out of their misery. Along the chain-link fence meant to keep pedestrians off the tracks was what looked like the kind of informal memorial often created at the site of fatal accidents, with homemade crosses, flowers, handwritten notes, and stuffed animals.

The performances were stellar. The band was looser than they usually are at a regular Wilco show, less art-rock intensity and more bar-band exuberance. They played all but one of the tracks from the first Mermaid Avenue album, six from the second, and three from Vol. III. (Unsurprisingly, the best songs from the sessions were selected for the first release, and there was a bit of diminishing returns with the subsequent volumes — though both Vol. II and Vol. III each contain some gems.) Tweedy and Bragg more or less traded off song-by-song, which made for a nice balance between Tweedy’s aching folk-rock voice and Bragg’s brassier one, with his thick East London accent. They sound completely unlike each other, and unlike Woody Guthrie, which is probably what makes the chemistry work so well.

They also brought out guests. Natalie Merchant, in the 80s the lead singer of the band 10,000 Manicas and my one teenage celebrity crush, came out to sing backup on “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” and lead on “Birds and Ships,” as she did on the first Mermaid Avenue album. On “Hoodoo Voodoo,” the penultimate song of the regular set, Merchant returned to just dance to the song’s funky, upbeat blues-rock, and Nora Guthrie came out on stage as well, playing a cowbell and theatrically going up to kiss Tweedy and Bragg on the cheek after every time Tweedy sang the lyric, “Kissle me now.”

Just prior to the final song of the regular set, Tweedy asked “are there any Mekons around?” and Jon Langford and Sally Timms from that storied British punk band, who delivered a fantastic politically-charged acoustic set as “Mini-Mekons” the next afternoon, came out on stage. (The festival was also my fifth time seeing Langford live.) They joined Tweedy and Bragg in singing “all you fascists are bound to lose,” a song which Tweedy introduced with, “Sadly, this song is wildly appropriate once again.”

They did five encores; for the last two — “California Stars,” the only song from Mermaid Avenue that Wilco regularly plays in concert, and Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” — they invited any other festival musicians who wished to join them on stage, along with a large crowd of Guthrie’s great-grandchildren. There must have been thirty or forty people on stage. Sarah Lee Guthrie, daughter of Woody’s son Arlo, sang the first verse of her grandfather’s anthem, Nora sort of declaimed the last verse in a kind of sangsprach, and of course everyone joined in on the chorus.

Tweedy introduced that final song of the night by saying, “To me, this is the best part of our American shared heritage, or American history. You know, caring about other people, feeling about other people, taking care of each other.” Turning to Nora Guthrie, he added, “Your father represented that, thank you so much for sharing his music with us.” I might have teared up a little.

As the musicians were leaving the stage and the audience was heading for the exits, Guthrie came up to the microphone, which was still on. She thanked Bragg and Tweedy and Wilco once again, spoke briefly about her father’s legacy, and left us all with the charge, “Let’s get to work.”

After the show finished, I walked back to the festival campground, which is about a mile down the road from the museum. Getting there a bit before midnight, I opted to just sleep in my car.

I woke up around 5am, as I am wont to do, even when I stay up late.

To the east, hundreds of small puffy clouds were strewn like pebbles across the sky, and the sun, still behind the mountains, was coloring them a deep red. I took a stroll down the road, past a sign shop, a vape shop, a weed dispensary, a carpet store, and a used car dealer, to the “Craft Food Barn,” which wouldn’t open for two more hours. I walked back to the campsite, got in my car and drove past the Dollar General to a Dunkin’ Donuts, got a French cruller and a coffee. The sun had come up, turning the sky a bright blue and the clouds a brilliant white.

For a moment, I felt a strange euphoria, a sense of possibility, like the ambient despair of the last year and a half, the last decade, maybe the last quarter-century, had lifted. It didn’t last, but it’s good to remember that I can still, sometimes, feel that.

Filed under: Music

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Through July 9, you can listen to a recording of the concert on the New England Public Media website. The music starts around 5:40.

Spotify user arthurberriman has thoughtfully put together a playlist of Mermaid Avenue songs that matches the setlist:

And way back for Domestic Left #3, I made a Spotify playlist of 4th of July songs. As I noted in that post, although it’s not my favorite, Independence Day has probably inspired more songs that I like than any other holiday:

Some previous 4th of July posts:

But it is far easier to apply this wisdom cheerfully to snow than to rain. I remember, decades ago, an Americorps volunteer who had moved from Seattle to Vermont telling me that he much preferred Vermont’s snowy winters to Seattle’s wet ones. Although granting that Vermont was colder, he said that the cold of a Seattle winter seeps into your bones in a different way. Snow can be brushed off, but once you are soaked by a cold rain it saturates your body in a way that, he averred, could never quite be alleviated by dry heat; only a warm bath would suffice.

***

In popular music, rain is commonly associated with sorrow and heartbreak. The easy analogy between raindrops and tears is, of course, low-hanging fruit: the Temptations “Wish It Would Rain” because David Ruffin hopes that “rain drops will hide my teardrops”; Elmore James proclaims that “The Sky Is Crying” because his worry that his baby don’t love him no more has been made material by the universe and is now raining down from the heavens.

When Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox first announces, “Here Comes the Rain Again,” the emotional valence of the rain is somewhat ambiguous — it is falling on her head like “a memory” and “a new emotion,” and seems to prompt her to “want to walk in the open wind” and “talk like lovers do.” However, by the second verse it is raining in her head like a tragedy, and not merely falling on her head but tearing her apart “like a new emotion.” Indeed, the band has confirmed that rain in this song is meant as a metaphor for depression, which the singer hopes to escape through romantic connection with the “baby” she is addressing, with whom she wishes to “talk like lovers do.”

Even when Gene Kelly is “Singin’ in the Rain,” it is not because the rain is a cause for joy, but because his heart is so full of love and happiness that he can laugh even at “clouds so dark up above.” In the promotional poster for the film, all three principles are shown with raincoats, hats, and umbrellas to protect themselves from the falling drops.

***

Growing up in the Midwest, rain came most often in the form of the region’s great thunderstorms, ferocious downpours accompanied by great cracking booms of thunder, brilliant flashes of lightning, and sometimes the wail of tornado sirens. There was a cycle: you would see the towering clouds coming in from the west, take shelter during the deluge, then emerge, not infrequently to sunlight, cooler temperatures, and lower humidity. One night, driving home after seeing Bob Dylan perform at an outdoor amphitheater in Kansas City, his final encore of “All Along the Watchtower” accompanied by distant thunder and lightning, my father and I had to pull the car onto the shoulder under an overpass to wait out a torrent of water that made driving all but impossible.

In the northeastern part of the country, where I have lived for 28 years now, rain tends to be more gentle, but also steady and unending. Vermont has the distinction of being the most-overcast state in the country; a Lyft driver in Pittsburgh once described the city to me, shortly after I moved there, as “the Seattle of the Northeast.”

***

At some point when I started running in organized races, about a dozen years ago, I realized that the set time and place of a 5K, a 10K, a relay or marathon puts the runners entirely at the mercy of the weather. If you are running on your own — especially if your work schedule is flexible or you are willing to vary your training plan — you can generally choose to run at times when it won’t be raining, or at least when the rain will be light. But, absent life-threatening conditions, a race generally goes on rain or shine.

This became especially apparent when I was running a leg of the Illinois Marathon relay in the spring of 2015. It was forecast to rain on and off all day, and a couple of miles into my eight-mile stretch, the skies just opened up. My shirt and shorts both got drenched, and began to chafe something awful, but there was nothing for it but to press on. At least I got to complete my leg, and there were warm, dry sweatpants waiting for me to change into, in the dry back seat of a car, when I handed off the baton to the next runner. The fourth member of our team got pulled off of the road during the final leg when organizers deemed the conditions, indeed, potentially life-threatening — thunder and lightning brought an end to the race before all but the fastest runners had completed the course.

***

About a week and a half ago, I had a pretty bad day. I had intended to work on a project that would require a lot of concentration, so I had planned to work at home, turn off my phone, and only check email at the beginning and end of the day. This plan also seemed appropriate as the weather forecast was for one of those steady, all-day northeastern rains.

As luck would have it, I did not sleep well the night before, and woke up ruminating on a variety of troubles. Prior to rising from bed, I contemplated the possibility of starting the day with a walk in the rain, or of taking a break mid-day to do errands or drive to the art museum, just to get out of the house and, I hoped, alleviate my melancholy.

But the prospect of rain soaking my clothes, even on a warm June day, even just in the getting from door to car, ended up seeming too much of a hassle, and I did not set foot outside all day. Instead, I just let the relentless gray downpour outside steadily dampen my already-despondent mood.

Reflecting on this experience the next day, I resolved no longer to let a little rain deter me from going outside. Fortunately, the weather obliged me with several chances to exercise that resolve over the following weekend without getting too wet.

I chose my gear reasonably well. The light biking jacket I inherited from my father is not completely waterproof, but offered enough protection that my shirt did not become as soaked as my pants. And for both shirt and pants, I wore (as I typically do in the summer) clothes made of “moisture-wicking” fabric, so they did not become as saturated with water as, say, a cotton t-shirt and jeans would have.

On my first venture out I did not wear a hat, and as the rain fell I could feel each drop’s impact on my scalp. The buzz-cut I have sported for the past year offered none of the protection my once-long hair used to, but it also allowed the water to run easily off of my head.

My eyebrows, not especially thick but bushy, were a different story. They collected the run-off from my forehead into plump droplets which hung there in the very corners of my vision, prismatic and portentous, until they fell back into the rain, rejoining the gentle watering of the earth.

***

My favorite band recently has been The Beths, a two guitars, bass and drums quartet from Aukland, New Zealand. The chorus of “Til My Heart Stops,” one of the standout tracks from their 2025 album Straight Line Was A Lie, begins with the couplet “I want to ride my bike in the rain / I want to fly my kite in a hurricane.”

In an interview with Liz Stokes, the band’s singer and songwriter, on the music blog Stereogum, journalist Spencer Hughes contrasts the song to another one on the album, “No Joy,” which is about the anhedonia, the inability to feel intense emotions, that is a common side effect of antidepressant medications. He asks, “It feels like kind of a twin to that, like it’s about wanting to break out of that numbness, and I guess visualizing it before you can actually do it, right?”

Stokes agrees, adding:

It’s like a longing song, right? It’s like, wanting to be in the world, wanting to feel like a part of it, when I feel like so often I’ve walled myself off from the people that I love, or from experiences that I wanna have. [ ... ]

I wanna live in the world, I wanna be close to the people I’m close to. And yeah, it’s like, wanting to experience that euphoria of connection.

Filed under: Water

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But beyond the dining room, on the west end of the house, was a large and comfortable kitchen. The color scheme — a dark reddish patterned wallpaper, with the cabinets painted a kind of pale ochre yellow — would probably not pass muster in today’s real estate market. There was a large L-shaped counter which jutted out into the room, marking roughly two-thirds of it as the “food prep” area, which held the sink, dishwasher, stove, refrigerator, and a walk-in pantry. The remaining third, facing the street, held the small table where we ate virtually all of our meals.

Like many families (especially smaller ones), each of us regularly sat in the same seat. My father’s chair was at the far end of the table, his back to the side window and a half-height bookshelf to either side. The bookshelf to his left, closer to the kitchen, held cookbooks and, on its top shelf, a radio, usually tuned to NPR or a classical station from Kansas City. The one to his right, in the southwest corner of the room, held his academic books — he was a law professor but had wide-ranging intellectual interests in philosophy, history, sociology and architecture, among other fields — and piles of the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and other periodicals.

This is not only where he would eat meals, but also where he would spend much of his time in the house, reading or taking notes on yellow ruled legal pads. (This was, of course, in the era before laptops.) It was, in a way, an extension of his office at the law school, which was also crammed with books, many of them marked up with the blue felt-tipped pens he favored. In both places, the books and other reading material often spilled off of the bookshelves, stacking into piles on every available surface. In our kitchen, other pieces of furniture like chairs and stools were periodically pressed into service to hold stacks of books which had accumulated on the table and would need to be removed before we could eat dinner.

In high school, my reading habits began to change from the science fiction and fantasy that I had favored when I was younger towards Serious Literature. This was in part the influence of two inspiring and energetic English teachers — Mrs. C, who taught American Lit I and II and about whom I have written before, and Mr. S, from whom I took Honors English 10, Humanities (a “Western Civ” style survey of not only literature but art and cultural history), and World Lit, in which I actually read every word of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. But it was probably mostly because over the course of my senior year I fell in love with and began dating A, an aspiring Serious Writer, whom I met the previous summer at a “state conference for high school writers.”

The kitchen wasn’t the only room in our house stuffed with books. There were bookshelves everywhere, and the north wall of the living room, which lay to the right of the front door, had built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace. This is where, I believe, I found a copy of the Turgenev novel from which this post takes its name.

The book’s Russian title, Otcy i deti, translates more literally to “fathers and children,” which sounds clunkier in English, but since the “children” in the story are young men, the snappier English title is no less accurate. Published in 1862, Turgenev’s novel deals with the philosophical differences between two generation of Russians, the idealistic Westernizing liberalism of the “fathers” and the radical nihilism of the “sons.”

If I picked up on that when I read it at age 16, though, it did not make much of an impression. (Well, certainly not enough of an impression to remember over 35 years later — I had to look up the novel’s plot online.) What I do remember about the novel was the mood, something that 19th-century Russian literature was exceptionally good at.

Compared to the wealthy urban socialites who fill the pages of Anna Karenina or the impoverished Raskolnikov, protagonist of Crime and Punishment, the characters in Fathers and Sons are of a more middling sort, the provincial gentry. They are hardly “middle class” in the modern sense of the term — they are, after all, literal aristocrats, with servants, whose wealth comes from owning land and the claims that land ownership gives them on the labor of the serfs who live on it. (Until 1861, serfs in Russian were legally bound to the land — a status not far removed from slavery — and even after the 1861 emancipation were still effectively compelled to work for landowners by other means.) But they also had professions — one father was in the civil service; the other is a retired surgeon — and, unlike the nobility of Moscow and St. Petersburg, live on their estates and take an active role in managing them.

In the country, the characters pass the time in philosophical debates while walking about the estates, eating, drinking wine. The sons have just returned from college in St. Petersburg, where the charismatic Bazarov has beguiled the less self-confident Arkady into the ways of nihilism. As I mentioned above, the content, and certainly the political implications, of these philosophical discussions probably went over my head. But the mood of constant conversation, of intellectual inquiry, of the importance of ideas, not only entranced my teenage self, but also felt quite familiar.

My father was a great conversationalist. As I wrote in a piece about him in 2024, on the 20th anniversary of his death, “My father was always striking up conversations with people he didn’t know and asking them about their lives, a combination of skill and temperament I wish I had.”

I don’t remember ever having any conscious desire to become a father. Not that I was committed to remaining childless; it was simply a part of adulthood that I don’t think I really thought about until the question was put to me in a very concrete way. In 1990, when A and I would imagine the future (like most teenage romantics, we imagined our love would last forever, but were a little fuzzy on exactly how that would work), we would be writers, and perhaps professors as well, and certainly surrounded by books, reading together in the evenings. But I have no memory of either the presence or absence of children being discussed at all.

And then in 1996, when I met the woman I would soon marry, she was pretty clear from the outset that she wanted to have children. So in fairly short order I became a father, and this became the defining identity of my life. Disenchanted with academia, I drifted out of graduate school and became a stay-at-home dad, something much less common in the late 90s and early 2000s than it is now. (At the time, I rarely saw any other men pushing children around in strollers, even in super-liberal Burlington VT.)

Although I got a part-time job in a UE shop that allowed me to maintain a connection to the labor movement, for a dozen years my life was mostly governed by the rhythms of raising small humans, tending to their needs and navigating their wants, being delighted and occasionally frustrated by their peculiarities. and above all simply being present for them. That last one, it seems, is the one that many parents of my gender miss out on, whether due to patriarchal self-absorption or economic necessity.

My father generally spent the standard 9-5 workday at the law school, reading or writing or preparing for class in his office when he was not teaching or meeting with students, but it still seemed like he was always around. (It helped that the Hillcrest house was only a couple of blocks from the law school.) Sitting in his chair in the kitchen, surrounded by books and periodicals and notepads, he was always happy to put them down to talk to the rest of us.

My children are both staking out adult lives now in new cities, and paying their own rent. Thanks to overtime and a Teamsters my contract, my daughter now makes more than I do, and my son, who will start as a full-fledged public school teacher in the fall, is in line for an actual pension, something few even in my generation can aspire to. Both of them are engaging conversationalists and great readers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are at least a few stacks of books on random surfaces in their apartments.

None of us who become parents have any idea what we’re doing, really, we just stumble through. Genetic drives push the species to procreate, and clearly we share with many other species the instinct to be protective of and tender with our young. But the hours spent in conversation, or just walking, eating, and drinking together, that’s what makes us fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, human parents and children.

Filed under: Personal History

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Speaking of nihilism, has a great piece about the recent UFC fight on the White House lawn over at :

The Drift

History is a hype reel

Fml For a few hours, it looked like a toss-up whether “UFC Freedom 250,” a combat sports spectacle held on the South Lawn of the White House on the occasion of Donald Trump’s eightieth birthday, would actually happen. Severe thunderstorms were blowing in from West Virginia — where I live, and where I briefly lost power. The swamp heaved with humidity; mo…

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2 months ago · 22 likes · 3 comments · Mitch Therieau

And on a more wholesome note about a more wholesome sport, and had nice pieces this week about the effects of the Knicks winning the NBA championship on the city of my birth:

Everything is Liminal

I wish you could have felt it

There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s 1994 Crooklyn where Clinton, the oldest among four siblings in Lee’s semi-autobiographical film set in 1970s Brooklyn, chooses to attend the Knicks game in the NBA finals over his struggling musician father’s jazz recital. During the concert, the camera pulls back to reveal a mostly empty auditorium. As family and friends celebrate post-concert around the dining room table, Clinton walks in through the front door, racked with guilt over missing his father’s big night. He somberly announces in a near whisper that the Knicks are champions before heading upstairs to his room…

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2 months ago · 92 likes · 57 comments · Jenna Park

Waleed’s Substack

We are so back.

I keep trying to name what got lifted that night the Knicks won, and the thing is, I’ve been thinking about it wrong, because it wasn’t something that got lifted so much as something that got put down, a whole set of instructions we’d been carrying so long we’d stopped calling them instructions and started calling them just, you know, how things are. A …

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2 months ago · 43 likes · 2 comments · Waleed Shahid

It has been a difficult week for both body and soul. It is not yet officially summer but already the heat and humidity are getting to me. I am a creature of autumn and winter, of earth and water; I have little use for the full fire of the sun. The next four months are going to be long ones.

A problem which had long been simmering boiled over this week. It was neither a problem that directly affects me, nor one that I have any ability to directly affect, but its larger implications have raised my choler.

I have spent much of the past week, therefore, in a kind of unpleasant hothouse of mugginess and bile. I have slept too much and exercised too little, eaten poorly, drank too much. I have left tasks undone and correspondence unanswered. I have been cranky and short-tempered; I have quietly despaired at the futility of it all.

I outlined a long piece for this newsletter. Its invective against pie cards and labor fakers was, I thought, cleverly disguised among reminiscences about junior-high and high-school social studies classes, tales of obscure tributaries of the American Left, the weird history of the concept of “cultural Marxism,” and a bit of literature: two books by George Orwell and a line of Allen Ginsberg.

That piece is unfinished — a bout of gastrointestinal distress yesterday meant I was unable to actually write anything but the introductory and concluding sections — and is likely to remain so. But as I workshopped its structure, submitted myself to the discipline of writing, my humors came back into balance. The piece’s working title, “If there is hope,” became less of the sarcastic, bitter observation it was originally intended as, and I resolved to end the piece with this quote from the American labor leader and socialist Eugene Debs:

Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but, notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thralldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as the setting of the sun.

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Although this week was a tough one, it did have some highlights, particularly receiving, in my capacity as editor of the UE NEWS, this article. Written by two rank-and-file members of UE Local 255 in Montpelier, Vermont, it tells the story of how their membership, taking to heart the old labor movement adage “an injury to one is an injury to all,” came together to support one of their co-workers who was unjustly denied a promotion. Stories like this are why I work in the labor movement, despite its frequent self-sabotage and self-dealing.

[T]he 59th Carnegie International considers the first-person plural as an open and evolving proposition—one shaped by listening, translation, and transformation—bringing together artistic practices that engage shared experience, circulation, and worlds in transition. Drawing from a commissioned catalogue essay by writer Haytham el-Wardany, the exhibition approaches “we” not as a unified subject but as a complex and porous position, attentive to contradiction and change.

I am still processing a lot of it, and at work on what will almost certainly be a fairly long essay about the exhibition. But there is no way it was going to be ready by today, so instead please enjoy a selection of photos and a link to an essay I wrote about the last Carnegie International, back in 2022.

Filed under: Art

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That all changed recently, when I was dragooned into the process of developing a UE policy on AI, which was adopted by our General Executive Board last week. The heavy lifting was done by a group of rank-and-file members from our graduate worker locals who drafted the statement; I mostly just did copy-editing to strengthen the language, and to bring in the perspective of hourly workers (adding “without loss in pay” wherever they talked about a shorter workday) and non-professional service-sector workers, who have been losing jobs to technology far before AI came around (remember when turnpike tolls were collected by actual humans?).

This also prompted me to try to read up a bit on the subject, and I thought I would share the best and most interesting pieces with you, dear readers, along with, of course, the UE statement itself.

UE General Executive Board, “AI for Public Good, Not Private Profit”

I thought our folks did a pretty good job creating a left trade-union response to AI, outlining the ways the technology could, in fact, be used to improve human flourishing and demanding public and worker control of it. The grad workers are a little bit more bullish on those possibilities than I am personally (insert meme of old man yelling at clouds here), but the statement was fairly thoroughly discussed by the whole board, the majority of whom do not work in higher education.

Dean, “AI is Capital”

This piece, which I just happened to come across on my social media feeds (they are still good for something, I guess), is I think the most brilliant piece I have read on the subject. In just eight paragraphs, Dean, a political theorist, begins from the experience of the personal user of services such as Claude and ChatGPT (“When an LLM helps a user commit suicide or redesign their living room, it is utterly indifferent to the meaning of the tokens it is producing. They are just tokens, like commodities are just commodities whether they are bullets or babydolls.”) and progresses to the analysis, perfectly obvious once you see it, that “AI” is a social relation just as capital is a social relation: it is a social substance (“the training data at the core of AI was produced by all of us, billions of us in our everyday interactions throughout recorded history”) that has been appropriated “as a private resource for the enrichment of a few.” If you read one thing on AI, read this.

Nicholas Beuret, “The AI Revolution Could Usher In a New Age of Stagnation”

This is a lengthy analysis of the likely economic effects of AI. Some of it, I must admit, went a bit over my head, but I appreciated the fact that it tried to steer a course between “AI will make everything wonderful” and “AI will cause an economic apocalypse.” I forwarded it to the research director at UE, and he was skeptical of the “cost disease” argument, but regardless, it seems fairly clear to me that we’re in for some good old-fashioned economic pain and disruption in the coming years, and the more clear-eyed we can be about that the better.

, “Community Resistance to Data Centers’ Poisoned Water in Rural Oregon”

Anne Peterman and Orin Langelle, who run the Global Justice Ecology Project, are old comrades from decades ago, and I just recently discovered that they’ve begun publishing regular updates on Substack. I listened to this podcast episode while at the gym last week, an interview with a clean-water activist fighting an Amazon data center in a “red” county in rural Oregon. It is an eye-opening account of how data centers’ immense thirst for water and energy are exacerbating existing environmental problems, and a concrete illustration of Dean’s point that “the struggle against data centers may be the strongest and clearest front in the struggle against the billionaire class today.”

Lyz Lenz, “Meet the woman dating Luigi Mangioni’s AI”

This is one of the most bizarre and fascinating pieces of reporting I have read in a long time. It’s behind a paywall, but worth the price of a subscription to Lenz’s publication Men Yell at Me (which you should subscribe to anyway; she does good work). It is an interview with a woman (I presume a fairly young woman) who believes herself to be “dating” ... I’m not sure exactly what, an AI bot programmed to “be” the alleged killer of United Health CEO Brian Thompson? She’s clearly highly educated, and not exactly delusional — she understands that the AI is not a real boy, and is in fact dating and considering getting married to a flesh-and-blood human being — but on the other hand, seems to consider the AI her primary source of emotional support.

Lenz warned her readers to be kind in the comments, as Alexa Caroline Modugno, the subject of the article, was going to be reading them. As near as I can tell, Modugno replied to almost every single comment with responses that another reader characterized as “coming across as very AI-coded.” Which seemed somewhat bizarre to me; I can see how asking AI to write a paper, or summarize a long text, would save time. But I cannot imagine how feeding comments — only a few sentences each — one by one into an AI, along with instructions on what kind of response to formulate, is any kind of time-saver.

Which leads me to two possibilities, both of them depressing. Either Modugno is using AI as a kind of emotional hedge, so she can respond to comments which might be personally hurtful to her (although most commenters complied with Lenz’s dictum), achieving the frisson of online interaction without the emotional risk. Or she in fact wrote the comments herself, and her use of AI has rewired her own writing into something less human; AI is not only producing slop itself, but AI-slopifying the writing actually done by humans.

Either way, I’m ag’in’ it.

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St. John is unbearably humid, and if you foolishly choose to do this hike in the middle of the day the sun beats down on you mercilessly, but on this final stretch you are rewarded with cool ocean breezes and, at the summit, which is also the end of the peninsula, stunning views. To the northeast lie the British Virgin Islands; to the west, you look out along St. John’s rugged southern coast. In the distance you can make out the mountains of St. Thomas and a few other, smaller islands. To the south, just ocean as far as the eye can see.

At the summit there is a plaque commemorating the Akwamu Insurrection, the most successful slave revolt in the Caribbean until Haitian Revolution in 1791-1804. St. John was, at the time, a Danish colony, and on November 23, 1733 a group of enslaved Africans entered the Danish West India Company’s fort in Coral Bay on the eastern side of the island. They killed all but one of the soldiers they found there, and then fired the cannons to signal a general revolt. White planters who were not killed in the initial uprising fled the island or to a fortified plantation on the northern shore. The formerly enslaved held the rest of the island for six months until the British and French, imperial rivals of the Danes but fellow enslavers, sent troops from their nearby colonies to suppress the revolt. When it became clear that the planters would regain control, in April 1734, many of the leaders of the insurrection, rather than return to slavery, took their own lives by leaping into the sea from the cliffs of Ram Head.

Anyone who knows me personally, or anyone who reads this newsletter carefully, may be shocked to learn that I spent a week on vacation in the U.S. Virgin Islands in February. I am not a fan of sun, sand, heat, or especially humidity. My idea of a great trip to the seashore is a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine in mid-November. But I suppose the price you pay for going on vacation with other people is sometimes acceding to their wishes.

We spent the second half of the week in St. John, where the U.S. Virgin Islands National Park protects approximately 60 percent of the surface area, as well as coral reefs in the ocean. This was the main draw, and if I am honest, the one that convinced me to come. Like virtually all visitors to the national park, we flew into St. Thomas, a slightly larger and far more touristy island just to its west, because there is no airport on St. John.

We spent the first half of the week in an Airbnb on St. Thomas with beautiful views out over Magens Bay. The Peterborg peninsula, across the water, stretches northwest to Picara Point and is, like most of the island, mountainous and forested and dotted with vacation rentals. Beyond its crest we could just see the dark green peaks of Great Hans Lollik Island in the distance.

It was a pleasant enough place to have coffee on the deck and watch the sunrise or sketch the view across the bay, and a fine home base to explore the island in a rented Jeep Wrangler, though the roads on both islands are terrifyingly narrow, windy, and steep. To make the driving experience even more terrifying, they drive on the left side of the road in USVI, presumably because of the proximity to the British Virgin Islands.

St. Thomas boasts many beaches, of course, with the perfectly clear, azure water the Caribbean is known for, and also a pleasantly ramshackle tourist town, Charlotte Amalie, where dining options range from powerfully air-conditioned restaurants serving expensive surf-and-turf and cocktails to Karen’s Place, a small house where Karen serves stew chicken, pork, and beef, fish dishes, and the Caribbean hand pies known as pates through a window to diners who sit on her porch in the shade.

For a little light beach reading, I brought with me British historian Imaobong Umoren’s recent book Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean.

Prior to this trip, my historical knowledge of the Caribbean was embarrassingly vague — as was, to be honest, my geographical knowledge. I knew there were a bunch of islands in the Caribbean Sea, south of Florida and north of South America, that the Spanish had begun colonizing them in 1492 and that the British and French soon got in on the act, that the U.S. took Puerto Rico and “liberated” Cuba during the Spanish-American War, that there were revolutions in Haiti in 1791-1804 and Cuba in 1959, that Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983. But I had not realized, until reading Umoren’s book, just how central the Caribbean was to the development of modern Britain — to its economy, society, and empire — and thereby to the development of capitalism and imperialism more generally.

The Spanish famously came to the “New World” searching for gold, but the commodity that made the Caribbean into what it is today, that transformed its landscape and culture, that made unimaginable fortunes for a few families in the wealthiest European nations while dispossessing the Indigenous people of the islands and immiserating millions of enslaved Africans brought here to work it, was sugar.

Originating in Asia, sugarcane was brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish, who began purchasing enslaved Africans from Portuguese slave traders to do the brutal and back-breaking work of clearing land for their plantations, harvesting the cane, and processing it. But it was the British who perfected the “sugar revolution” and its reliance on hereditary chattel slavery in their colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, and others. London became the center of the transatlantic slave trade, while absentee planters flaunted their wealth in the courts of Restoration and Georgian England.

Umoren writes:

The Caribbean became for Britain a place of wealth extraction that set the region on the path toward underdevelopment. And in one way or another, enslavement in the Caribbean infiltrated and helped shape almost all the economic, political, and social institutions of Britain. It was not solely the extraction of resources generated by enslaved people in the Caribbean, but all the organizations that supported enslavement: shipbuilding, banking, insurance, political representation, religious associations, universities, to list just a few.

It is hard to describe how huge cruise ships are if you have never seen one in person. I watch enough travel shows on YouTube that I have seen plenty of advertisements for Caribbean Princess and other cruise lines, but those ads do not really convey the sheer mass of these floating pleasure palaces.

In St. Thomas, they dock at the port of Havensight, just south of Charlotte Amalie, where they dwarf the nearby terrestrial buildings with their multi-story bulk. Their passengers, disgorged in pairs and small groups, wander through Havensight Mall and The Shops at Yacht Haven Grande and up into town, perusing stores selling jewelry and other luxury goods, drinking piña coladas and painkillers.

It was difficult not to be a little judgmental. Cruise ships are one of the most carbon-costly ways to vacation: the carbon footprint of a week on a cruise ship is more than twice that of flying and staying in a luxury hotel, more than three times that of a road trip in an SUV. And the whole point of a cruise ship is to insulate its passengers from any inconvenience, including the inconvenience of thinking about the history or political economy of the paradise islands you stop at.

But, I will say, the people from the cruise ships looked really happy. While they were certainly affluent, they were not necessarily the rich, those who, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s formulation, are not like you and me. Many of them were probably retired union members. A particular pair sticks in my mind, an older Black couple in matching t-shirts reading “St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands,” who ambled into the Stone House restaurant and bar just as we were finishing our cocktails. They were smiling ear to ear, clearly enchanted with each other, and with the adventure they were on, having the time of their lives.

In the Western imagination, islands are often places of freedom and transgression — Never Never Land, Treasure Island — and that sense of the normal rules not applying is no doubt part of the appeal of a Caribbean vacation. As in New Orleans, you can walk around downtown Charlotte Amalie with a drink in hand, and all the bars open early.

In the early 70s, in one of the more bizarre stories I came across while researching this post, a Las Vegas real estate mogul named Michael Oliver hatched a scheme to create his own micro-nation by, essentially, building a new island on the Minerva Reefs in the southwest Pacific, where no nation had claimed jurisdiction. It was to be a libertarian paradise, of the sort tech bros dream about, a perfect free market with no taxes or regulations. He created the “Ocean Life Research Foundation” to build the island, and even had coins minted.

As Raymond Craib wrote in a 2022 article about Oliver’s efforts in Slate:

In August 1971, the Ocean Life Research Foundation arrived at the Minerva Reefs and began the arduous process of building an island in the southwest Pacific. A dredging vessel piled sand on the reef, while a small crew erected two mounds made from coral wrapped in chicken wire and encased in concrete, upon which they then constructed 26-foot vertical markers topped by a flag representing the Republic of Minerva.

But in early 1972, the king of nearby Tonga — whose people had long fished and lobstered in the Reefs — learned about the project and sailed with a brass band to the new island to claim it; ultimately Oliver backed off.

The sense of being outside of the jurisdiction and mores of polite society, of having no constraints, also no doubt played a role in the almost unimaginable savagery and cruelty with which European colonizers treated the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the Taino and Carib, and the enslaved Africans they brought to the islands to work their plantations. Umoren relates the case of “one of the most sadistic serial rapists” in the Caribbean, the English-born planter Thomas Thistlewood, who kept diaries recording almost 4,000 rapes of 138 women and girls over 37 years, along with savage beatings and punishments so cruel one can scarcely imagine a fellow human being concocting them.

Virgin Islands National Park preserves not only nature, but also the ruins of the Danish sugar plantations that used to cover the island.

The Danish abolished slavery in 1848, a little over a decade after the British and almost two decades before the U.S. Like planters in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South following emancipation, the Danish tried to create other forms of unfree labor to force formerly enslaved people to continue to work on the plantations, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. Without access to coerced labor, the plantation economy of the islands collapsed.

The U.S., as a rising power with imperial ambitions, began negotiating to purchase the Danish colonies in the Caribbean in the late 1860s, though it took until 1917 to finalize the sale. Ironically enough, given what was dominating the headlines the month before we were there, one of the provisions of the deal to purchase the Virgin Islands was the U.S. renouncing any claims to Greenland.

Charlotte Amalie’s main commercial street, Dronningens Gade (“Queen’s Street”) is lined with buildings built in the 18th and 19th centuries. On the north side, they are generally two-story buildings where merchants would have their shops on the ground floor and living quarters on the second; on the south side, it’s mostly one-story former warehouses. Now, most of them are filled with establishments serving the tourist trade: upscale stores like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Rolex; art dealers and souvenir stands; and coffee shops, bars, and restaurants.

But as the street progresses westward, further from the cruise-ship docks, it becomes less and less touristy, and by the time it crosses Palm Passage, many of the buildings are boarded up or closed. One such building on the north side of the street, with pink plaster walls, white shutters, and green wooden doors, has a sign hanging out front proclaiming it “The Camille Pissarro Building.”

Thus it was that I learned that the renowned painter, the only one to have his work displayed in all eight of the Impressionist exhibitions and a sort of father figure to the younger painters of that movement, was born in St. Thomas in 1830. Although his father was a reasonably wealthy merchant, he had violated Jewish law by marrying his uncle’s widow. Young Camille was therefore not allowed to attend the local Jewish school, and instead went to an all-Black primary school.

In adulthood, Pissarro became a committed socialist and anarchist, frequently painting working people and industrial scenes. “Everything is beautiful,” he said, “the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret.”

The truly rich, the ones who are not like you and me, do not come to the Caribbean on cruise ships, nor do they stay in fancy hotels. They own their own mansions on the crests of the mountains, or in some cases their own private islands. Great Hans Lollik, along with its neighbor Little Hans Lollik, are owned by Google co-founder Larry Page. In the British Virgin Islands, the British billionaire Richard Branson owns Necker Island; the American commodities trader Henry Jarecki owns Guana Island and Norman Island.

And the islands of Greater and Lesser St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, were owned until his 2019 death by Jeffrey Epstein. They lie just off the southeast tip of St. Thomas; as we were taking the ferry over to St. John, not a few of our fellow ferry passengers were sticking their heads out of their car windows, gawking and pointing at the now-infamous site of libertinism and transgression, savagery and cruelty in our own era.

Umoren ends her book with a section titled “Repair and Renewal,” reviewing the current state of calls for reparations for racial slavery and colonialism, especially in the Caribbean and Great Britain. She quotes the Bajan historian Hilary Beckles, who was part of the Reparations Commission of CARICOM (Caribbean Community), a political and economic union of 15 Caribbean states. For Beckles, she writes, “the objective of reparations is not to punish or penalize the offender, but to establish conditions for a just, reconciled future. Reparation is not an action of confrontation, but a search for unity; that is, the aim is repairing a damaged relationship.”

On Saturday morning I woke early and slipped out of our campground “cottage” in the national park alone, to hike up “America Hill.” It was a short hike, maybe three-quarters of a mile each way, and the trailhead lay just across the street from the campground. The first half ascended steeply along the Cinnamon Bay Trail — the initial part of which consists of wooden stairs, though it doesn’t seem to get any less steep once it turns to dirt — and the second half was a set of nearly-as-steep switchbacks up to the top of the hill. The air was still and hot and humid as fuck, and by the time I got to the summit I was soaked in sweat. It was a little before 7am.

At the summit, however, there were plenty of cool breezes as I inspected the ruins of a planter’s great house. What remains of the walls are still mostly covered with plaster, painted pink like the Pissarro house. What had been the interior of the structure is now home to trees and shrubs, growing up and over the walls and crawling out through the windows. To the northeast, there is a stunning view of Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, and in front of it Little Thatch, owned by a Colorado millionaire who made his money selling cell-phone cases.

I took a few photos, but the location seemed to call for an older technology of reproduction, one that left more room open for interpretation, for making sense of the legacy of this place. So I took out my sketchbook, my pen and colored pencils, and sat down under a tree.

Filed under: Travel

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The ones whose labels I read were made in the twentieth century in countries in the western and central part of the continent — Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most are identified as “water vessels,” though others were intended for storing palm wine or dry goods. Though built as functional objects, they are also intricately decorated with ridges and grooves, geometric forms and depictions of animals and people. Each of them has, as Walter Benjamin might say, a strong aura — the aesthetic authority of being a unique creation, from a specific time and place, with a specific ritual and cultural meaning to those who made it, those who used it, and those who simply saw it.

And they are huge. Most of them are probably two to three feet high, and about two feet in diameter. Making them must have been an act of intense physicality for the anonymous-to-us artists, and using them to transport water or other goods would truly have been a feat of strength. My arms ached just looking at them.

The Stanley is part of the University of Iowa, and owes its existence in no small part to the 2008 flood that inundated several university buildings situated on a low plain along the Iowa River, including the music, theater, and art buildings. UI’s art collection was saved thanks to the “nonstop” work of staff and volunteers, but “the museum building was deemed unsuitable to hold fine art after the flood.” For a decade and a half, the collection led a nomadic life, its artworks on display at the Figge Art Museum in nearby Davenport and in a temporary gallery in the Iowa Memorial Union, and on loan to other institutions around the world.1

The new art museum, named after an Iowa businessman who donated millions for its construction, sits just south of UI’s Main Library. It opened in the summer of 2022.

Unlike the university museums in other places I have lived — the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas and the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont, both of which are housed in neoclassical buildings with grand central foyers and galleries that are recognizably, well, rooms — the Stanley is built in a modern, modular style that can accommodate artworks on a much larger scale than its peer institutions. It is a miniature MoMA to the Spencer and Fleming’s miniature Mets.2

This was particularly brought home to me when I arrived at the room holding Sandra Sawatzsky’s The Black Gold Tapestry. It immediately reminded me of the room at MoMA which holds Richard Serra’s Equal, which consists of eight massive steel cubes stacked in pairs. Not that there are many similarities between the rooms, or the artworks. But in each case, the museum’s ability to devote an entire room to a single, large-scale artwork gives them a sense of grandeur, an architectural cue that these are not works to simply stroll by and take in with a glance. They are works that demand not only your attention but your full physical presence, that relate not just to your eyes but to your whole body, your whole being.

The Black Gold Tapestry, an embroidered artwork on linen which will be on view at the Stanley through the middle of June, stretches 220 feet around the walls of the room, approximately the same length as the Bayeux Tapestry which it was, in part, inspired by. Like its 11th-century predecessor, Sawatzsky’s work tells its narrative through a series of scenes in a wide central band, with decorative embellishments in narrower bands above and below.

That narrative is the story of oil, first called by the term “black gold” early in the twentieth century. But the tapestry begins long before that, when “Living things decomposed in the bowels of the earth, forming the sticky black oil seeping to the surface.” The most iconic of long-ago living things, dinosaurs, populate the decorative bands at the top and bottom of the tapestry3 as Sawatzsky goes on to tell how this precious “black gold” was used to make bricks in the ancient world, to make a napalm-like incendiary weapon (“Greek fire”) by the Byzantines, and eventually to make kerosene, the first refined petroleum product, in the nineteenth century.

It’s a fascinating history, and includes a number of stories of which I was previously unaware, such as the fact that the Chinese began using natural gas, and pumping it through “pipelines” made of bamboo, as long ago as 500 BC. And a terrifying one, as it rolls into the twentieth century and oil becomes inextricably bound up with not only the slow destruction of environmental degradation, but also the fast and fiery destruction of war.

The most well-known piece of art in the Stanley’s collection, the painting which graces the home page of its website, is Jackson Pollock’s 1943 Mural. The largest painting Pollock ever completed, it was commissioned by the art dealer and heiress Peggy Guggenheim for her New York City apartment. In 1951 she donated it to the University of Iowa — at the time one of the few large public universities with a serious art program.

(While at the museum I overheard a member of the UI faculty or staff giving a tour of the museum; he said that Guggenheim sent the painting postage due, and that it sat at the Iowa City post office for a period of time because the university either didn’t have the funds or the desire to pay the shipping costs.)

Eight feet high and almost twenty feet wide, Mural takes up an entire wall. There is a bench set perhaps twenty feet back from it, in the center of the room, for those who want to sit down while contemplating Pollock’s work. Widely considered to mark his turn towards abstraction, it is intensely rhythmic, with vertical black strokes that could be a series of figures marching across the painting from right to left, or could just be a product of how Pollock slung his brush up an down as he moved across the canvas. (Although this myth has been widely debunked, Pollock once claimed he painted the whole thing in a single day of feverish activity following a period of creative blockage.) You can almost see the genesis of his famous “drip technique,” in which he stood over canvases laid flat on the floor and dripped or spattered paint onto them, in Mural’s aggressive and frenetic brush strokes.

I never really cared much for Pollock until a 2024 visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which was the first time I really took the time to see one of his paintings in person. His artworks, in the mechanical reproduction of photography — and particularly digital photography, reproduced endlessly on screens — easily reduce themselves to caricatures of abstract art, simultaneously childlike and pompous. And the artistic movement he helped found, Abstract Expressionism, is somewhat tainted by its appropriation and promotion by the CIA during the Cold War as an alternative to Socialist Realism.

But in person, if you take the time to simply be in front of a Pollock painting, it can inspire the same kind of awe as standing before a mountain range or the ocean. Like the mountains or the sea, a Pollock painting simply is, a brute fact of existence before which your feeble attempts to understand or grasp it intellectually are doomed to failure, and it is precisely in that surrender of your rational facilities that its power lies.

Pollock found fame in the postwar era, an era in which American art was dominated by the figure of the great (and usually male) artist making works of heroic size, pushing abstraction to its limits and finally breaking free from the influence and shadow of Europe. Having grown up in Wyoming, Pollock is easy to see as the very epitome of this figure, a lone (and lonesome) cowboy charging to the very frontiers of art. (Although, as the YouTube art historian James Payne explored in a two-part series on Pollock, he owed much of his success to women who supported him both emotionally and financially.)

He came to a tragic end. A lifelong alcoholic and serial philanderer, he died in 1956, at age 44, in a car crash while drunkenly speeding through Long Island with a much-younger artist with whom he was having an affair.

The postwar era was also when the use of fossil fuels really took off.

The African ceramic vessels that populate the glass cases at the entrance to the museum’s galleries, given to the museum by various donors over the decades (UI has one of the most important collections of African art in the country), arrived of course on the circuits of colonialism. And as Dr. Boureima Diamitani, who got his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in the 1990s, notes in the wall text, colonialism has also undermined contemporary pottery production on the continent:

In some regions of Africa today, pottery production is losing its aesthetic quality and ritual relevance. This derives in part from the imposition of European colonial rule in the nineteenth century and the use of new imported containers. These factors destabilized the functional processes of pottery, among others, significantly affecting the practice of this form of artistic expression.

Many of those new imported containers are made of plastic, a petroleum product. And colonialism is central to the story of “black gold” as well — a key scene in The Black Gold Tapestry depicts the debt-ridden Shah of Persia signing away all of his country’s oil rights to William Knox D’Arcy, the founder of what would become British Petroleum.

Sawatzsky’s tapestry might fairly be called “monumental” or “heroic” in its scale and ambition, but it is a very different form of heroism than Pollock’s; it is the heroism of repeated small acts, one grounded in the aesthetic quality and ritual relevance of the “domestic” (and female-coded) art of embroidery.

I loved both Mural and The Black Gold Tapestry, but I think my favorite piece in the Stanley’s collection is a 1973 painting by Alma Woodsey Thomas. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South in 1891, Thomas was a contemporary of Pollock’s and embraced abstraction every bit as much as he did. She was a public school teacher and the first Black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney, in 1972.

Spring Embraces Yellow is a series of short vertical brushstrokes of yellow acrylic paint on a large canvas — more than six and a half feet high, almost four and a half feet wide. It’s rhythmic and bright and standing in front of it, in Iowa in mid-April, I felt a lightness I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Filed under: Art

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With all of the work I’ve been doing the past few weeks, and especially all of the writing work I’ve been doing, I’m actually a little surprised that I’ve still been getting a newsletter out every week. (ngl, might take next week off.) Anywhere, here are a couple of pieces I wrote for work recently that I can share publicly:

90 Years of UE: A Timeline

The union that I work for, UE (full name: “The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America,” which I have always thought is one of the most musical names in the labor movement), is celebrating our ninetieth anniversary this year. It occurred to me as I was putting together the most recent issue of the UE NEWS — the first of four print issues that will be produced during our anniversary year — that no one had really crafted an overarching narrative of the union’s history since a booklet that was produced in the 90s called Solidarity and Democracy: A Leadership Guide to UE History. Essentially, the last 30 years (now one-third of the union’s whole existence) were kind of just lumped together in most people’s minds into “and then we started organizing workers outside of manufacturing...”

So I set out to create that narrative, in a brief enough form to fit into a couple of pages of the union’s newspaper. It’s written as a short article, dividing the union’s history into seven eras, interspersed with a timeline (which may be of less interest to the general reader, as part of its purpose is to help members place the origin of their own locals within the larger union’s history). But I thought it might also be of interest to Domestic Left readers who are not familiar with UE’s story, to give a sense of how remarkable this union that has defined much of my adult life really is.

You can read the text here, and view a PDF of how it was laid out (like a real timeline, by my talented coworker Ebony Thomas) in the print issue of the UE NEWS here.

A Nuts-and-Bolts Guide to Independent Working-Class Political Action

I also reviewed my comrade Tomás Garduño’s new booklet The Fundamentals of Electoral Organizing for the UE NEWS. This 67-page booklet is, I wrote, “a clear and accessible how-to guide for working people who want to make electoral politics better through organizing,” one that “squarely and soberly addresses the question of how the working class can engage in meaningful political action when electoral politics in this country is dominated by two corporate parties.” If that’s up your alley, check out my review, or just head over to www.fundamentalsofelectoralorganizing.org to get yourself a copy.

Although I didn’t mention Pollock in this post about my visit to MoMA (and the Whitney Biennial) in 2024, it also deals with monumentalism in art:

And this post, from 2023, also deals with art and fossil fuels:

One of the characters in the story was Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer who spied for the French during World War I, but was tried and executed as a German double agent in 1917. My text would definitively prove that she was, in fact, a triple agent and that her trial and execution was an elaborately staged ruse to keep the Germans from finding this out. She went on to live a long and happy life under an assumed identity in Los Angeles, having affairs with Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, and Arnold Schoenberg.

I planned to sell it as a chapbook, whose pages would be shipped in a round plastic container shaped like an onion and assembled by the purchaser.

Upon waking, I realized this was probably not a very good business model.

I haven’t written poetry since I was a teenager. My poems were not very good. To be honest, they were mostly just very short essays clinging for dear life to the left side of the page.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I did not want to buy anything, process anything, or sell anything. But of course, in adult reality, we are all trapped in the M—C—M’ circuit of capital, and those are our only three choices. Pick wisely.

I am standing outside your bedroom holding a chapbook above my head.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote, “the desire of man is the desire of the Others.” I have no idea what this means. I have not read Lacan, but I sometimes listen to a podcast about psychoanalysis,1 and one time on this podcast the hosts and the guests were talking about the desire to be seen as someone who reads Lacan, and about how ostentatiously reading Lacan in public, or even just carrying around a book of Lacan on the bus or the subway, is the most Lacanian thing you can possibly do.

People in the West who have never read a single Buddhist text will sometimes ostentatiously assert that desire is the root of all suffering. I have, on occasion, been one of those people. Despite our ham-fisted appropriation of another culture we barely understand, we are not wrong.

In 1988 in a studio in Dublin, Larry Mullen Jr. started playing a Bo Diddley beat, and Bono started singing about “a preacher stealing hearts at a traveling show,” recalling the combination of African rhythm and Irish footwork that gave rise to tap dancing. When “Desire” comes on, it’s hard not to dance. They filmed the video in Los Angeles.

This post woke me up at 4:30am and would not let me get back to sleep. Mostly what I desire these days is to be able to get back to sleep.

Desire is a shell game. I offer you three shells: a story, a poem, and an essay. Which one will you pick?

Filed under: Stories

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Books

Despite putting this newsletter on pause for a month last year in an attempt to spend more time reading physical, printed books, I only ended up finishing nine last year. (Though at least that included four of the five books pictured in the linked post.) A third of the way through this year, I am doing much better, having finished eight and being part-way into two more. Here are a couple of ones I’ve read recently:

Abram Shalom Himelstein and Jamie Schweser, Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing

When I lived in Iowa City in the mid-90s, I was vaguely aware that my friend Jamie Schweser, who I knew through the short-lived Iowa City Free Radio, was writing a novel with a friend of his, and that they were both writing it and laying it out, often late at night, on computers rented by the hour at the Kinko’s copy shop in downtown Iowa City.

Decades later (i.e., last year), I finally got my hands on a copy. It’s a quick, breezy read — I read it in its entirety on my flight to California last month — and thoroughly enjoyable.

Although I was never a proper “punk rocker” myself, I was what people might now term “punk adjacent” — I knew people who played in bands, put on shows, made zines, did Food Not Bombs, and so forth. This novel feels very true, in both narrative and aesthetic, to what I knew of those scenes, both how exciting they were and how claustrophobic, judgmental, and stiflingly conformist they could be.

The book is brilliantly constructed as a series of letters (which, in those days, were the only way to communicate with your family and your high school friends after you left for college or otherwise moved away), journal entries, agitational posters, and three complete zines, plus one partial one. The zines are especially well done, replete with the typos and weird spacing of media produced with manual typewriters, the literal cutting and pasting of paper on paper, and Kinko’s Xerox machines.

Although that might sound like it would be hard to follow, the authors do a great job of developing a real narrative, a touching but far from treacly coming-of-age story, over the course of the book. And even though most of the characters besides the protagonist are only sketched lightly, you do get a real feel for them as individuals, not the kind of stock characters they could easily have been.

Also, the book is full of the kind of sentences I wish I had written, is often quite funny, and is just a lot of fun to read.

Andy Merrifield, Roses for Gramsci

Michael Yates (an editor at Monthly Review Press, the publisher of this book) suggested I read Roses for Gramsci after I posted Domestic Left #137, which concerned, in part, the life and physical sufferings of the Italian social theorist and Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci.

In this book, Merrifield recounts how, having recently moved to Rome and looking for inspiration for his next book, he takes a volunteer position at the cemetery where Gramsci is buried. He proceeds to give us a fantastic tour of Gramsci’s life, thought, and posthumous history, digging into Gramsci’s letters and notebooks as well as visiting key locations of Gramsci’s life.

Merrifield travels not only to the apartment in Rome where Gramsci was living in when arrested, but also to the prison-like clinic where he was confined in the last years of his life, a two hours’ drive from Rome, and to the towns in Sardinia where he was born, grew up, and attended school. We learn how, as a child, Gramsci fashioned crude dumbbells for himself out of round stones to do exercises to compensate for the malformation of his spine. We see him writing letters from prison to his landlady, his mother, and his sons. We learn about his wide-ranging intellectual interests (among other things, he translated two dozen of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales into Italian), and the fact that he wrote an animal story for children (“The Mouse and the Mountain”) which is, according to Merrifield, often read to children in Italy’s elementary schools today.

Not that the book is just a cuddly biography — Merrifield also offers clear and incisive summaries of Gramsci’s thoughts on politics and strategy, and the debates he took part in within the Communist movement. But they are beautifully set within an account of the man’s life, one clearly lived with both a strong passion for justice and an intense curiosity about the world, and one cut all too short by fascism.

Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist

A bit of a cross between memoir and popular science, this book chronicles Miller’s obsession with David Starr Jordan, an accomplished ichthyologist and the first president of Stanford University, hoping that something in his life would help her deal with existential crisis and heartbreak. The writing is clear and engaging, as one would expect from a public-radio host (she co-hosts Radiolab), and the personal details are handled with a thankfully light touch.

It is an enjoyable read, but her stabs at drawing broader meaning, especially broader political meaning, from Jordan’s life largely fall flat. In addition to being a brilliant researcher of fish, Jordan was a committed eugenicist, but Miller’s responds to this (perhaps unsurprisingly) only with a vaguely social-justice-y NPR liberalism (“categorizing people is bad!”) rather than using Jordan’s story as a way to investigate the complicated role that science played in the development of capitalism and imperialism.

Articles

Lester K. Spence, “The Counterpublic Papers, vol. 10 no. 10”

Spence is a professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and he has written occasionally in his newsletter about the deleterious effects of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” (I refuse to call large language model algorithms that without scare quotes) on students’ ability to learn. However, in this newsletter, he outlines several ways he himself has used LLMs in research, project design, and writing. I remain a skeptic, but this article was an interesting peek into some of the large-scale (and labor-intensive) processes that go into some kinds of academic work, and the ways in which LLMs do make it easier to do more with fewer resources.1

, “The moral status of artificial intelligence”

Speaking of AI, I quite enjoyed this recent three-part series on the Substack about the moral status of AI agents — though her investigation is applicable to the speculative future in which we create some kind of actually-intelligent (or conscious AI2 than to our current LLM technology. I especially liked part 3, where Stonestreet suggests: “maybe we just shouldn’t”:

Humaning is Hard, but Philosophy Can Help

The moral status of artificial intelligence, part 3: maybe we just shouldn't

I ended last week’s post with the suggestion that this entire discussion might indicate that we should just not build a system that brings us to the point where the moral status of AI becomes an urgent question. I’d like to think this out a little more…

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4 months ago · 11 likes · 5 comments · Erica Lucast Stonestreet

, “Brutalism is a Humanism”

Martel is one-half of the duo behind the arts and philosophy podcast Weird Studies, which I have been listening to fairly consistently for a couple of years now; he has fairly recently started a Substack called . In this essay, originally published in the North American Review, he offers up an idiosyncratic defense of Brutalism; suggests that the architectural style’s aesthetic extended (under assumed names) into other art forms, especially painting (Rothko) and film (Kubrick), and was, in fact, the defining aesthetic of the Cold War era; and argues that “Brutalism holds the key to the thought of a truly magical cosmos.” It’s a wild read, and I highly recommend it:

The Imp of the Possible

Brutalism is a Humanism

This piece, first published in the North American Review (and republished here with new annotations), came back to mind this week as I obsessively watched a series of YouTube “reactions” to the Canadian avant-garde rock duo Angine de Poitrine. In case you haven’t heard, Angine de Poitrine (French for “chest pains”) is a duo from Saguenay, Québec, who pe…

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4 months ago · 26 likes · 9 comments · JF Martel

Podcasts

Depresh Mode

While I don’t listen to it as much as I used to, the mental health podcast has been really helpful to me over the years in navigating the world with, as host often puts it, an “interesting brain.”

Now Moe wants to make a new limited run series, Your Best Life In Hell, which, in his words, “would be the first show I know of dedicated to recognizing that people are in worse mental shape because of the extreme stress of the socio-political reality we live in.” I think this is a great idea. If you agree, please consider joining me in supporting the idea financially — this link will let you sign up to support Depresh Mode with one click at $5/month, or you can also go to maximumfun.org/join/ and pick out a higher amount. (You’ll just have to go through the extra step of selecting Depresh Mode as the show you want to support.)

Red Medicine

The latest episode of — one of my favorite podcasts — is a bit of a departure from the show’s usual focus on issues of health, medicine, and the body. Instead, the topic is the 1926 general strike in Great Britain. (Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the strike’s beginning.)

Like virtually everyone who has studied labor history in the U.S., I am broadly familiar with the “making of the English working class” in the 18th and early 19th century — to use the phrase that serves as the title of E.P. Thompson’s 800-page investigation thereof, which more or less launched modern labor history as a discipline. However, my knowledge of British labor history between the 1830s (when Thompson ends his book) and the miners’ strike in the mid-80s is almost non-existent.

Host Sam Kelly and guests Callum Cant and Matthew Lee, who recently published The Future In Our Past: The General Strike 1926/2026, don’t actually talk about the specifics of the strike that much (they don’t even get to the strike itself until an hour in), but the episode is a fascinating discussion about how the composition of the British working class was changing in the first quarter of the 20th century, the ways in which that was both similar to and different from the ways it is changing today, and the implications of that history for current and future working-class struggles.

Red Medicine

When Workers Nearly Overthrew the British State

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4 months ago · 3 likes · Red Medicine

Movies

Sometime near the end of last year, I had the thought that maybe 2026 would be the year I finally got into film as an art form.

Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)

I actually saw this last year, in December, as a kind of trial run for this ambition. It opens with an itinerant film-projector repairman waking up in the VW van he lives out of and watching another man drive his car into a lake, in what is perhaps a kind of suicide attempt, or maybe just some kind of grand existential gesture. Regardless of his intent, the man does not drown, and the VW driver takes him in. The two then spend the three hours of the movie driving around. Not much happens.

It’s shot in black and white, with lots of stark and at times bleak shots of rural and small-town West Germany. We get to know a little bit of both men’s backstory. The climax of the film, if it can be called that, takes place in what seems to be an abandoned military outpost by the border with East Germany. I can’t say I understood the movie, but I enjoyed it.

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

Back in Domestic Left #46 I wrote about my distaste for film:

What bothers me about film as a medium is its overwhelming force, the plentitude of tools a director has at his or her disposal to sculpt your emotional response: light, sound, close-ups, long shots, dialog, music, quick cuts, long pans, landscapes, interiors, winks, grimaces, commotion, silence, humor, pathos, life, death, kisses, tears. And I am just incredibly resistant to turning my emotions over to someone else so completely for two-plus hours.

Fifteen minutes into watching Marty Supreme, I couldn’t take any more how the overwhelming force of film was being directed to making me feel anxious, and I walked out of the theater. When I met the rest of my party later, my son told me I had made the right call, that it didn’t let up for the rest of the film.

The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969)

An expressionistic, almost surrealist film about the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, made during the Soviet era. I thought about writing a whole post about this film after I saw it in early April, and to that end committed to memory the phrase “My childhood fashioned a poet’s lyre and handed it to me,” which appears early in the film. Although it follows Sayat-Nova’s life in a more or less linear fashion (he is portrayed as a child, a young man, and an old man in sequence), the film doesn’t really have a narrative; it is more a succession of (moving) images, with recurring themes of musical instruments, water and other liquids being poured over bodies, and sacrifice. Like Kings of the Road, it is shot in black and white, and also like Kings of the Road, I enjoyed the movie without necessarily understanding much of it.

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025)

Just saw this last night. Set in the city of Cluj, in the Transylvania region of Romania, the film’s protagonist is a bailiff (essentially, an urban sheriff) whose attempt to evict a destitute man living in a boiler room leads to his suicide. She had been trying to help him get into a shelter, had delayed the date of his eviction for a month, but her hand had been forced by the developer who had purchased the building, and was planning to demolish it to build luxury apartments. She comes upon his body minutes after he dies, having hanged himself from the radiator using a wire. (We hear, but do not see, him dying.)

The film follows her as she tries to deal with her guilt, recounting the scene to various people — her husband, her liberal middle-class friend, her mother, a Zen-koan-spouting former student she runs into randomly who is now working as a bicycle-deliveryman, and her Orthodox priest. They all respond in ways that are, well, alternately sympathetic and horrible, but by the end of the film she seems to find some kind of closure, and decides to join her husband and children on the holiday in Greece she had initially begged out of.

It is a remarkably gentle film — dark moments that in an American film would foreshadow some dramatic crisis to come are, in fact, just left there for the viewer to sit with. One of the recurring themes is ethnic tension between Romanians and Hungarians. (Transylvania was part of Hungary until the early 20th century, and has an ethnically-mixed population.) The bailiff is ethnically Hungarian, the man who died was once a star Romanian athlete, and early in the film she and her Romanian husband are reading violent online comments by Romanian nationalists blaming her for the suicide and calling for revenge. This left me slightly anxious throughout the whole film that she would be subjected to random violence at any moment. But it never materialized.

Instead, the film just explores, through a combination of dialog and long, still shots of buildings both ancient and modern, the complexities of living in a post-Soviet society where the former secret police are now all-powerful real estate developers, where economic growth and poverty co-exist in the same blocks, and where people are driven by a complex mix of generosity and compassion, resentment and disgust, lust and guilt, and above all desire for forgiveness.

Filed under: Books

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Previous posts in this series:

This past year, I decided to finally deal with a variety of health things I had been putting off — finding a new regular doctor (my previous one retired a few years ago), getting screened for colon cancer, going to the dermatologist to make sure the weird growths I periodically get on my neck aren’t cancer (they aren’t), going to the sleep doctor to deal with my sleep apnea. And, to top it all off, I fell and dislocated my shoulder and broke a couple of bones in November. When I was first thinking about writing this year’s birthday post, its working title was “My medical year.”

A couple of the books I’ve been reading recently describe, or at least touch on, the various waves of Western interest in Asian religions and philosophies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More than one of them have mentioned, at least in passing, Āśrama, the four stages of life as described in ancient and medieval Hindu texts. Ever since I came across this schema, I have been mildly obsessed with this concept, and particularly with the third stage, Vanaprastha — the “Way of the Forest” or “Forest Road,” which begins around age 50.

According to my cursory research on Wikipedia, while the name might imply a sort of going off into the forest alone, it was (or is) “in practice, a metaphor and guideline. It encouraged gradual transition of social responsibility, economic roles, personal focus towards spirituality, from being center of the action to a more advisory peripheral role.”

Decades ago, my friend M told me a story about her father, who was a colleague of my father’s but quite a bit older, at a faculty meeting. Responding to an agenda point about introducing some kind of new computer-related technology, he slammed his fist down on the table and announced, simply, “I’m ag’in’ it!”

More and more I feel like this myself, not just about new technologies that I dislike (so-called AI) or don’t understand (TikTok), but about a whole set of technologies that have come into being (or into more widespread use) since I was a child: social media, smartphones, cellphones, email, even answering machines.1 Occasionally I have even found myself overcome with a violent physical aversion to the prospect of looking at any kind of screen: phone, computer, television, even the dashboard of my car. This is not ideal, as virtually everything I do for work is done on a computer or a phone.

Fifty-three is a prime number. Some time ago, probably more than half of my lifetime ago in the midst of the exhaustion of children’s birthday season (my children’s birthdays are eight days apart), I had the thought that perhaps going forward I would only recognize and celebrate prime-number birthdays. My last prime-number birthday was 47, which occurred right at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. So there was not much celebration.

Prime numbers, of course, get less frequent as one counts higher, but they have a charming tendency to come in pairs called “twin primes,” two prime numbers with only one regular (or “composite,” the mathematical term for a non-prime) number between them. Three and five, five and seven, 11 and 13, 17 and 19, 29 and 31, 41 and 43. The next prime number I will (hopefully) hit, 59, has a twin: 61. If I am reasonably lucky (and start taking better care of my health), I stand a decent chance of celebrating 71 and 73.

After that, there isn’t another set of twin primes until 101 and 103. More than two millennia ago, Euclid proved that there is an infinite number of primes, but in all the time since, no one has been able to prove whether the number of twin primes is also infinite, or whether there is some largest pair out there in the farthest reaches of mathematics.

Red maples are named, not for the brilliant red color their leaves turn in the fall (that’s true, I believe, of most if not all maples), but for the red flowers they sprout in the spring, before they even begin growing new leaves for the season.

Shortly before I turned 48 (a very composite number: 2×2×2×2×3), a bit stir-crazy from a year of pandemic lockdown but not quite yet vaccinated, and desperate for some solitude, I booked an Airbnb for the weekend in Rutland, Vermont. Rutland was far enough away from Burlington to serve as an actual getaway, urban enough to explore on foot, and, well, down-at-the-heels enough to be pretty cheap.

I spent most of Saturday wandering around the 325-acre Pine Hill Park, in the northwest corner of town. The trails there seem to be designed primarily for mountain biking — some of them are in fact reserved solely for mountain bikes, presumably to prevent hikers from being mowed down by mountain-bikers hurtling downhill. But the place is vast enough, and when I was there the mountain-bikers few enough, that I was able to spend hours in a kind of meditative contemplation.

It was a cloudy, foggy day, and the trees were still bare, a landscape of dreary browns and grays, with the intermittent dull green of pine and hemlock. It was a landscape which fit my mood well, as I was at the time sliding into what would become a months-long spell of depression. But at some point, I got out of my own head enough to notice that the trails were dotted with all of these specks of brilliant red, maple flowers washed down from the trees by recent rains. They were everywhere, and I had not noticed them until more than halfway through my hike.

During my “medical year” (which, let’s be honest, will probably just be the first of many), I acquired three three new apps on my phone: MyChart for managing all of my appointments in the hospital system, as well as paying my bills;2 myAir for managing the CPAP machine I got for my sleep apnea; and MedBridgeGO to remind me to do my physical therapy exercises every day. (MedBridgeGO also features instructional videos to remind me how to do the exercises, which I have to admit was really helpful at first.)

But it’s the default “Health” app that most starkly tells the story of the impact my fall had on my life. Prior to my fun trip to the hospital, I had been running more, and more regularly, than I had since about a decade ago, when I was running marathons. Now this app helpfully reminds me most every day about these wonderful Trends:

This coming Friday is May Day, and the May Day Strong coalition (of which my union, UE, is a part) is holding “workers over billionaires” rallies and marches in over 1,000 locations and promoting it as a day of “refusing business as usual through no school, no work, and no shopping.”

May 1 has been celebrated as International Workers’ Day since 1889, when it was declared as such by the International Workers Congress in Paris. It is, one might say, a “red” holiday, one that both commemorates and celebrates workers’ struggles. But, as the historian Peter Linebaugh wrote in his 1986 broadside “The incomplete, true, authentic and wonderful history of May Day,” the holiday also has a much older, “green” side, one stretching back before the Roman Empire, to a time when “the earth was blanketed by a broad mantle of forests” and in many parts of the world “a person might travel through the woods for two months without gaining an unobstructed view of the sky.”

This is the May Day of maypoles, of ancient pagan rites, of fertility and play. As Linebaugh notes, “Within the woodland ecology our ancestors did not have to work the graveyard shift, or to deal with flextime, or work from Nine to Five.” And indeed, one suspects that it was in part for this reason that American workers in 1886 chose May 1 as the date they would strike for the eight-hour day — for, in the parlance of the time, “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”

I have a vacation day scheduled for Friday, a relic of a planned trip to New York which fell through because I waited too long to request an appointment at NYU archives. Were I still going, of course I would have joined the May Day festivities there, and spent much of the rest of the day in the archives looking at old union records. The Grihastha, or “married householder,” stage of my life has been largely centered around the red, the workers’ struggle — as a rank-and-file member, as spouse to an organizer (and parent, it turned out, to two future rank-and-file union members, and at least one future steward), and for the last eight years as union staff myself.

But this May Day, I think I am going to spend the day in the forest.

Filed under: Aging

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This is the first time I have been back to Iowa City since 2018, when I came out to help the local navigate certain aspects of an onerous antiunion law passed by the state legislature in 2017. But I spent most of those two weeks either on campus, in the union office, or holed up in my hotel room doing other work, so I didn’t get much of a sense of how the town had changed in the two decades since I had left. And, of course, that trip itself was almost eight years ago.

I am an unrepentant nostaglist, as I suspect are many of my fellow tellers-of-stories, at least those of us who had reasonably happy childhoods and have had reasonably happy lives. I love visiting old haunts. Although the word’s Greek roots mean “the pain of returning” (or of wanting to return), nostalgia is widely acknowledged to be a bittersweet pain, and I find the sweetness more powerful than the bitterness. I also find that time evens out the bitterness: the ache of old wounds subsides with the years, while the glory of triumphs acquires a certain rough edge as they recede into memory and irreplicability, and as they are put into perspective by the march of time.

I lived in Iowa City for almost three years, from August 1995 through June 1998, but first fell in love with the place in the spring of 1993. I was visiting Grinnell College, an hour to the west, as a prospective transfer student, and while in the area decided to visit a friend from high school who was attending the University of Iowa.

He took me to a charming bakery and cafe called The Cottage, located in a small, cottage-like building with a porch at the corner of Linn Street and Iowa Avenue, on the northeast corner of downtown. And then in the evening we went to the legendary Iowa City music venue The Mill and saw a local singer-songwriter named . I can still remember the chorus of one song in particular, “Mobile,” even though I have never heard it again since that night.

The city seemed magical to me: a more compact, more sophisticated, but still Midwestern version of my college-town hometown in Kansas. It wasn’t decisive, but my affection for Iowa City definitely played a role in my decision to transfer to the small college down the road.

T and I began dating at the beginning of our last semester at Grinnell. She was a biology major who shared my vaguely left-wing politics, had an off-beat sense of humor, and was a bit less straight-laced than the English major I had dated my junior year. I still have a bottle opener in the shape of a Modelo bottle that she brought me back from studying abroad in Mexico. She was cute and fun and sensual, and our bodies fit well together. One very cold morning I took her on what I thought was a great romantic winter date — driving to Iowa City to have breakfast at The Cottage.

By the time we started dating, I was already in the process of applying to graduate schools, and I can’t say that I remember taking our relationship into much account when thinking about my post-college future. But sometime after an offer of a generous fellowship sealed my decision to go to Iowa, she decided to go to nursing school there as well, and got an apartment a block away from the one I had secured.

In retrospect, this was a classic patriarchal move, where the man pursues his career and the woman follows the man — and I imagine she was aware of that. To my clueless self at the time, though, it just seemed like a happy coincidence. I was beginning adult life with a cushy fellowship and a girlfriend that I loved in a town that I was entranced by. Life was good.

Having a fellowship meant I was able to dive right into my studies, something made even easier by the fact that the labor historian I had come to Iowa to study with, Shel Stromquist, was teaching a research seminar the first semester that I was there. I had actually done some original historical research as an undergraduate at Grinnell, and I was happy to once again dive into the world of small-town newspapers in the 1890s.

In this case, I was looking at how they had written about “Kelly’s Army,” one of several “industrial armies” of unemployed men who traveled to Washington, DC during the depression of 1894 to demand jobs — the country’s first “march on Washington.” Kelly’s Army had two key things recommending it as an object of study: 1) an 18-year-old Jack London was one of the marchers, and kept a journal which was later published, but more importantly 2) they came through Iowa, where I was studying.

I spent hours in the State Historical Society in Des Moines looking at microfiche replicas of all those small-town newspapers along the marchers’ route, writing down notes by hand, and then I spent hours on one of those old, boxy Macintosh computers writing my paper, saving it on a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. I was completely in my element.

And then, of course, there was the union. As I recounted in Domestic Left #122, I got involved with the “Campaign to Organize Graduate Students,” or “COGS,” in my first week or two of graduate school. During our unionization drive, I organized teaching assistants in the Dance, Theater, and Music departments (well, the Dance and Theater TAs more or less organized themselves, once I found some excellent leaders in each department), and I served on the coordinating committee with graduate workers from across the university.

Our union election was on April 16, 1996; the vote count was the following day. The staff were convinced we had lost, because the overall turnout, over 1600 votes, was more than twice the “yes” votes we had confirmed. (They wisely did not share their pessimism with us.) But as the yes votes continued to pile higher and higher, we all got more and more excited, and after they announced the final tally, 949-667 — a pair of numbers I will probably remember until my dying day — we began a spontaneous march around campus. That night, we took over the local queer bar, dancing until they closed and receiving multiple shout-outs from the DJ.

I was texting with the person who had been the lead UE organizer on the campaign the other day. When I told him I was in Iowa for the anniversary celebration, he told me, “I thought we were going to change the world with that campaign.”1

My apartment that first year in Iowa City was a characterless one-bedroom apartment, one of eight in a squat, utilitarian building. It was an easy walk to campus, just southeast of downtown on a block otherwise filled with huge apartment complexes full of undergraduates. In those days before weather apps on smartphones, I would gauge how warmly to dress each morning by looking out the window to see how other people walking to campus were dressed — something I learned was a mistake as the weather got colder. UI undergrads dressed to impress each other, not to protect themselves from the Iowa winters.

T’s apartment was on the second or third floor of a 19th century house one block to the east, on Dodge Street. Naturally, I spent a fair amount of time there, and remember it as charming, if a bit small — but she quickly came to dislike it. I don’t remember why: it might have had an off smell, or problems with the plumbing. But within a few months she had hatched a plan to break her lease and move into a two-bedroom house she had found for rent several blocks north, on Market Street.

The house was nice, but she couldn’t afford it by herself, and asked me to move in with her. I didn’t love my apartment, and I wasn’t necessarily opposed to living with her, but I had no stomach for the hassle of breaking my lease. I tried to talk her out of her plan, and I might well have even suggested that we move in together the following year, when our existing leases were up. But ultimately I said no to her request.

Of course, at the time neither of us had the language to be able to separate out the relationship question (do you want to move in with me?) from the real estate question (does it make sense for us to break our leases and find a new place?). I thought I was answering the second question, but she was probably asking the first one.

Fortuitously, her move to Market Street coincided with UE sending a field organizer to Iowa City to work on our organizing campaign. He needed a place to live; she needed a roommate. Problem solved. Or so I thought.

I finally got into my Airbnb around 1:30am last Sunday night; the only flights from San Jose to Cedar Rapids get in around midnight, mine was a bit late, and then of course it’s a half-hour drive to Iowa City. After a restless seven hours or so of sleep, and a couple of hours of answering work emails and calls, I went out for a walk.

Heading north along Gilbert Street, which is more or less the eastern border of downtown, I saw some familiar sights — the Robert A. Lee recreation center, in whose community room I had once organized a public forum about corporate ownership of the media; the music club Gabe’s, where I witnessed one of the few real bar fights I’ve ever seen in my life (someone broke a beer bottle over someone else’s head; one of my friends, a law student-turned-organizer, stanched the bleeding with his shirt). But also an awful lot of ugly new buildings, including a high-rise hotel far too high — at least 16 stories — for this town.

On the southeast corner of Market and Gilbert, John’s Grocery, where T got a job as a cashier (nursing school doesn’t generally offer assistantships or fellowships), still seems to be in business. So does the Fox Head Tavern, a dive bar across the street on the northeast corner, frequented by students at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and consequently, at least at the time, studiously avoided by everyone else in town.

Once block to the north, I turned west on Bloomington, then south on Linn, past the Hamburg Inn No. 2, a greasy breakfast and lunch joint. When I lived in Iowa City, the singer-songwriter Greg Brown lived in an apartment above the Hamburg; if you went there for breakfast at the right time, and sat in the front, by the windows, you could often see him coming down in the morning to purchase a paper from the box on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Yet another small way in which life was better before the internet.

Although my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas is definitely a “college town” (home to the University of Kansas), Iowa City is dominated by its university in a way that I have never seen anywhere else. The downtown is not only immediately adjacent to the campus, they actually interpenetrate: several academic departments are located in the “Jefferson building,” which sits right on the corner of Dubuque and Washington, at one edge of the downtown pedestrian mall. The Old Capitol Mall sits immediately south of the Pentacrest, the iconic set of five buildings on a green that appears in all of UI’s promotional materials.

And the downtown is dominated by bars, restaurants, and other establishments that cater to college students, the kinds of places that in Lawrence are located in the Oread neighborhood closer to campus. A lot of them are still the same as they were in my day. The Deadwood “Institute of Higher Learning” (a bar). The Dublin Underground, where the “United Irishmen of Iowa,” a small group of male graduate students from the History department, would meet on Friday afternoons, using Robert’s Rules of Order. Micky’s Irish Pub and Grill, which had a great spinach salad on the menu. Union Pub and Grill, which had the same menu (and presumably the same owner) as Micky’s, but where the prices were $1 more. And of course Joe’s Place, where the tradition of a monthly COGS happy hour has persisted to this day.

The city’s premier coffee house, The Java House, is still here, and I spent most mornings over the last week working in its back room. They specialize in pour-over coffee; back in the 90s, they had a bank of four pour-over stations, each adorned with a photograph of a famous person, and would tell you, after you ordered, “Your coffee will be under Albert Einstein” (or Martin Luther King, Jr., or whoever), and you would then pick it up yourself. Now the bank of pour-overs has expanded to ten spots, but they are marked with numbers and bland inspirational quotes, and they don’t even tell you where your coffee is going to be, they just take your name and call it out once its done.

Most of the rest of my favorite places are gone, though. The Mill. The Sanctuary, another bar with live music and a fantastic beer selection. Dagwood’s, a sandwich shop named after the Blondie comic-strip character. The Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company, which, its name notwithstanding, had great sandwiches and salads and a delicious carrot cake. The tobacco-and-coffee shop on the ped mall, where you could sit and drink coffee and smoke all afternoon. (Okay, I’m not surprised this last one is gone.)

And where The Cottage used to be, a multi-level parking garage filling an entire half of a block.

Despite my emotional cluelessness about the apartment move, things seemed to go well with T during that first semester. We were mostly homebodies, cooking dinner together in each others’ kitchens most nights. She was the first person I ever shared a kitchen with who had the confidence to cook without a recipe (she once made a casserole from canned salmon and triscuits that I still remember the sublime taste of), and she taught me how to properly fold a burrito.

We made Thanksgiving dinner together at the Market Street house; her parents came down from Wisconsin and some friends of ours who were still in school at Grinnell joined us as well. It felt like we were a real adult couple.

One December night I met her at the end of her shift at John’s. It was in the middle of a brutal Iowa blizzard, the kind where the wind whips the snow right into your face at 60 miles per hour. We probably should have gone right back to her house, but instead we headed half a block west to George’s Buffet, a dive bar that was blessedly free of writers (and which, so far as I know, has never had a buffet). We drank a couple of beers and, thusly fortified, walked back to her place, huddling against each other like Suzy Rotolo and Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, a couple of lovers building a bubble of warmth against a cold world.

I found myself mildly depressed by the way so much of the downtown has been filled in and overtaken by bland, rectilinear buildings built of metal, glass, and flat plates of boring color. It wasn’t just the high-rise hotel and the massive parking garage; all the new buildings are a little too big for the space they are squeezed into, even the new public library. They have filled all the empty space that gave downtown Iowa City its laid-back, Midwestern feel, without bringing any of the excitement or sophistication of a real city.

But even worse was the sense of disorientation I felt from not quite remembering where things were, or used to be, or even whether I remembered them or not. I think the building that used to house the History department has been torn down to make way for a new glass-and-metal Biology Building East, but I couldn’t swear to it. Was the Haunted Bookshop always in that 19th-century sandstone house on Gilbert just south of Market? Or am I confusing it with some other “haunted bookshop” in some other town? And the Oasis, a falafel joint that a former co-worker of mine who also came out of this local always raves about2 — did it exist when I was here, and I just never ate there? Or is it newer than its 70s-style decor would lead one to believe? Or did I simply find it forgettable?

There are also whole geographical features that I seem to have no memory of. The Iowa River, which runs through the middle of campus, I of course remember, but Ralston Creek, which meanders through the neighborhoods east of downtown, and which I must have crossed hundreds if not thousands of times — no memory of it at all.

Still, there were some compensations. I notice different things now in middle age. Like the remaining bits of older, interesting architecture. Right across from Gabe’s, on Washington Street, is a lovely art deco building (of which I also have no memory), built in 1937 to house the Iowa City Press Citizen, the city’s paper of record. And the way the city in spring is full of birds: sparrows and finches, robins and cardinals, and red-winged blackbirds by the river, their songs weaving together into a cheerful fugue.

In 2017, the Iowa state legislature amended the state’s public-sector collective bargaining law, making it far more difficult for public-sector unions like COGS to function. They are prohibited from bargaining over many key issues, including healthcare; cannot strike; and can only take one issue — wages — to arbitration. Arbitrators can’t award wage increases higher than either three percent or the Consumer Price Index for that year, whichever is lower. And unions cannot collect dues (which are already voluntary, thanks to the state’s nearly 80-year-old “right to work” law) through payroll deduction, making it cumbersome to sign up new members. While the local has still had some real victories, they have been fighting an uphill battle for most of the last decade.

I was very much in love with her, but T was sometimes a bit of a downer. She was one of the inspirations for a theory I developed around that time, that people tend to see the world through one of the four classic forms of theater: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or farce. I had (and still have) a strong propensity to see the world through the lens of melodrama. T, it seemed to me, always saw it through the lens of tragedy.

There was no particular drama to the end of our relationship; as people often say, we “grew apart.” One day in January I was walking through the Old Capitol Mall on my way to one of the UI buildings on the other side. Everyone in the mall was bundled up against the cold, and my mind was on other things, until suddenly T was there in front of me, walking the other direction but furious that I had not recognized her.

We finally broke up on Valentine’s Day, while walking home from a Greg Brown concert at The Mill. I had bought the tickets because I thought it would be a nice romantic thing to do on Valentine’s Day, and as near as I could tell, we both enjoyed the show, cuddling in a booth. But when she named the distance between us as we left, I couldn’t really argue with her.

Although my memories are a bit fuzzy, I am sure I suffered an intense sadness. When it comes to romantic relationships, my emotional engine only really has two gears: full-on in love or heartbroken. But I imagine an impartial observer, such as yourself, dear reader, might conclude from the above that in this case, I had in fact been stuck in neutral for some time.

On Tuesday, as I was wrapping up work and heating up some frozen enchiladas for dinner in the microwave, I heard a sound that I immediately recognized from my childhood in Kansas: a tornado siren. There had in fact been a tornado that touched down quite close to Iowa City the last time I was here, in 2018; the storm turned the sky over downtown a queasy green color and we all took shelter in the back of Joe’s Place. (The storm happened during COGS Happy Hour.)

Even though it was still sunny outside, I was a bit concerned, because my Airbnb was in an attic, and as everyone knows the weather can change in an instant in the Midwest. Before I could get my wits together to contact the host to ask about access to their basement, though, the siren stopped. As the weather app on my phone still read “tornado watch” (i.e., conditions are ripe for tornados to form) not “tornado warning” (a tornado has actually been sighted in the area), I decided I would be okay. There was, in classic Iowa fashion, about fifteen minutes of intense downpour, complete with hail, and then everything cleared up.

I went out for a stroll, up to Goosetown, the neighborhood northeast of downtown where I lived during my final year here, and then to Oakland Cemetery, which lies just to the north. The sun, low in the sky, was turning the western faces of the towering thunderclouds that had just passed over us a brilliant orange.

In the cemetery, I found the Black Angel, an eight-and-a-half foot bronze statue commissioned in 1913 by a wealthy Czech widow named Teresa Feldevert to memorialize her son, who died of meningitis when he was eighteen, and her third husband. (Her ashes were also buried there when she passed away in 1924.) Despite it apparently being the stuff of numerous local legends, I remember being only vaguely aware of it when I lived here.

The angel is not misnamed — she is a dark, metallic black. This is a function, apparently, of both the particular metals used in making her (bronze is an alloy of copper with other metals, which can vary) and the particular weather patterns and environment in Iowa City. (In the article linked above, Paul Benson, an art conservator for the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, tells the reporter, “Put a sculpture out in Kansas City, put another one out in New York City, they may turn completely different colors.”)

She cuts an imposing figure. She stands on a four-foot base, making the whole thing almost thirteen feet high. Just to her side stands a smaller monument in the shape of a tree trunk, made to honor Feldevert’s son Eddie when he died in 1891. Eddie’s death wasn’t the only tragedy in Feldevert’s life: her first son, Otto, died when he was just two weeks old, inspiring her to study to become a midwife.

Like most traditional depictions of angels, this one appears to be wearing a full-length dress, but it is not the flowing, pleated, robe-like garment worn by Michelangelos’ Angel of Arca di San Domenico. I don’t know by what magic the artist, Josef Mario Korbel, a Czech sculptor from Chicago, achieved this, but the dress seems almost diaphanous, while remaining completely chaste.

Her wings, though, are surprisingly heavy. The left one is braced against her left arm like a shield, as if to fend off more tragedy, while her right arm, and wing, are raised, sheltering young Eddie’s memorial, a tree cut down in its prime.

That night we got a proper Midwestern thunderstorm, complete with flashing lightning and deafening thunderclaps. It woke me up around 2am. Yet surprisingly, despite my lifelong insomnia, I was able to get right back to sleep, and woke early the next morning, completely refreshed.

In the mid-2000s, when “google” was first entering the English language as a verb but before the rise of social media, I, like many people, began using the internet to look up folks I had lost touch with. The only trace of T that I found was a brief commentary she had submitted to some kind of public radio survey.

I don’t remember the details, and anyway, her story after we parted is not mine to tell. But I remember at the time thinking that it confirmed my theory about her seeing everything through the lens of tragedy.

And of course my theory is stupid and reductive. But I don’t know, maybe seeing her life as a tragedy was a way for her to give some kind of grandeur to the way she cared so intensely about the people around her, her community, her world, yet was always disappointed by them. A way to process suffering that did not, as melodrama does, require a hero to fight the good fight all the time — and to win. And perhaps, in those months in the fall and winter of 1995 and 1996, a way to break free of a man who was not up to the challenge of being the partner she needed.

Filed under: Personal History

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Some other writing about the COGS organizing campaign:

1. This piece, from last fall, goes more into detail about the process of organizing, and also includes other reflections from my three decades in the labor movement:

2. Following my last trip to Iowa City, I wrote a brief post on my old Wordpress blog about organizing the Dance department.

3. Two of UE’s current graduate worker members (one from Iowa and one from MIT), along with a UE communications staffer who comes out of our grad worker local at the University of New Mexico, wrote a great piece last week on the history of graduate worker organizing in UE, and how it all started with our local at UI.

I’m in Monterey for a midweek stay in a hotel in between a couple of sleeping-in-a-van days in Pinnacles National Park and a couple of sleeping-in-a-van days in Big Sur. But the real reason I insisted on adding Monterey to the itinerary is that it is the setting for what is probably my favorite novel, one of the few I have read more than once: John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

Written near the end of World War II but set in the 1930s, Cannery Row is a sort of collective picaresque of Monterey when it was the Sardine Capital of the World, one of the busiest commercial fishing ports in the country, where “silver rivers” of sardines flowed off of ships and into the city’s twenty or so canneries. It doesn’t have much of a plot, and some of the characters shade into cliché (there is the obligatory “whore with a heart of gold,” for example), but it is a charming and evocative portrait of an industrial city during the Great Depression — not so much of its still-employed proletarian workforce but of those who exist around its edges: a group of homeless men, a marine biologist, a Chinese shopkeeper, a painter, and the aforementioned bordello owner.

Steinbeck wrote that Cannery Row was “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” So I suppose I was looking for a little of that.

Monterey was founded in 1770 by Gaspar de Portolá and Junípero Serra, the first a Spanish colonial administrator and the latter a Franciscan priest and missionary, making it the oldest settler city in the state. With Mexican independence in 1822 it became part of Mexico’s “Department of the Californias.” It was claimed (though not, in reality, ever governed) by the short-lived California Republic, proclaimed on June 14, 1846 by 33 white men from the U.S. who had immigrated to Mexico illegally. On July 7 of that same year, during the Mexican-American War, a force of U.S. marines and sailors under the command of Commodore John Sloat landed and raised the American flag over the Custom House. Sloat proclaimed “henceforth California will be a portion of the United States,” and the California Republic dissolved two days later, its military force of a couple of hundred men subsumed into the U.S. Army.

The city is filled with monuments: to its founding and its founders; to Sloat’s invasion; to Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of the Italian fishermen who flocked to Monterey during its fishing heyday; to the “cannery divers” who maintained underwater pipes that pumped sardines ashore from floating hoppers; to Steinbeck’s fictional characters and their real-life counterparts; to Kalisa Moore, a Latvian-born cafe owner who helped the city’s economy transition to tourism once the canneries began closing in the 1950s; to the four businessmen who completed that transition in the later part of the century. In 1976, Spanish King Juan Carlos I donated a statue of Portolá to the city to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial; the Spanish colonial administrator now looks out over the entrance to the Portola Hotel & Spa and the Monterey Conference Center.

Monterey’s transition to a tourist economy in the latter half of the twentieth century was not entirely unprecedented; in the latter half of the 19th century, before the growth of the canning industry, the city had a bit of a reputation as an art colony. In 1901, San Francisco financier Hugh Tevis built a huge estate called Casa de Las Olas (“House of the Waves”) along the eastern half of what is now Cannery Row.

According to a historical plaque titled “The California Riviera,” when Casa de Las Olas was being built:

the local press conjectured that “Monterey may yet become the Newport of the Pacific Coast.” However, the silver harvest of sardines was about to begin and with it, the creation of Cannery Row, whose “stink” became the smell of prosperity. The San Carlos Canning Company bought the Tevis-Murray estate in 1941 and tore it down to build a new cannery in 1944.

There is no evidence of that “stink” today, of course, and the old cannery buildings have, for the most part, been so successfully repurposed as restaurants and boutiques and other tourist attractions (most notably the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which opened in 1984) that they give little hint of their former role.

I suppose canneries, by their nature, do not leave behind the same kind of monumental industrial infrastructure as the steel industry did; there is no equivalent to the blast furnaces and other metal behemoths that dot the former mills now redeveloped as commercial districts in and around Pittsburgh. Still, it was a disappointment to get almost no sense of what used to be. Along with the stink and the grating noise, the redevelopment of Monterey has also largely eliminated the quality of light, the tone, the habit, the nostalgia and the dream that drew me there in the first place. It was hard to imagine Doc, Mack and the boys, Lee Chong or Dora Flood inhabiting (or in the case of Mack and the boys, a group of homeless men, even being allowed on) these pristine streets.

Doc, the central character in the novel, was based on Steinbeck’s close friend Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist who researched tide pools and ran a marine biology supply house. However, Ricketts was not the only marine biologist active in Monterey in those years. Another historical plaque, on the west edge of Cannery Row, commemorates the biologists who worked for the California Department of Fish and Game. It notes that:

Based on their research between 1919 and 1929, Monterey Fish and Game scientists declared on April 15, 1930, that unless the canneries slowed down and took smaller catches, the local sardine fishery would collapse.

Their warnings were not heeded; sardine populations in the Monterey Bay began to plummet in the late 1940s and most of the canneries were closed by the early 50s. The last cannery, Hovden, hung on by canning squid; it eventually closed in 1973, the year I was born.

In retrospect, the thing that made me fall in love with Cannery Row when I read it as a teenager, and that continued to entrance me when I reread it as an adult, is the way the novel captures the optimistic, generous and democratic spirit of the New Deal era — not so much the specific (and imperfect) government programs that we often think of as comprising “the New Deal,” but rather the open-hearted and compassionate embrace of all of humanity that informed them.

That, too, has largely vanished.

But I still look for traces of it, in architecture, in literature, in art. Which is why I was relieved, as we walked Cannery Row from west to east on Tuesday night, to find one building not yet repurposed to commerce, to providing pleasure for the well-off. Having been abandoned by man, its concrete seaward skeleton has been reclaimed by a colony of cormorants, gathered there waiting for nightfall.

In the morning when I returned, just as day was breaking, I ventured out onto the small public-access beach next to the abandoned building. One by one the cormorants left their perch to find sustenance from the depleted sea. The quality of light was not the one Steinbeck had known, but it suited me. We find poetry and dreams where we can.

Filed under: Travel, Books

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I learned about his death by walking into one of the dorm lounges. Despite it being a bright, sunny spring afternoon, or perhaps because of that, the folks in the lounge had turned off all the lights and closed all the shades. The television was tuned to MTV, which was replaying Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set, recorded the previous November and initially aired in December.

Returning to the floor that I lived on, I found one of the more obnoxious first-year students who also lived on the third floor wandering the hallway with his acoustic guitar. He was the kind of heavy-metal guitar bro who spent hours learning complicated Yngwie Malmsteen solos in his room. But that night he was playing the (simple and repetitive, but effective) chord progression from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” over and over again and smirking, “It’s my tribute, dude.”

I first heard about Nirvana in mid-September, 1991. I had just begun my first year at Sarah Lawrence College, just outside of New York City. After a couple of weekends of taking the train into the city and just wandering around aimlessly, some of the people I was hanging out with in those first weeks of college decided that maybe we should give some purpose to our trips into the city by picking up a copy of The Village Voice, looking for a show we might want to go to, and getting tickets.

One of these people was from Seattle, and he recognized the name Nirvana on a listing for some small club in the Meatpacking District. It was an all-ages show (or at least 18-and-over), and on a Saturday, and not too expensive, so it met all of our criteria.

Not only did the guy from Seattle recognize the band’s name, he had a cassette tape copy of their 1989 Sub Pop album, Bleach. We listened to it, decided it was okay enough to justify going to see their show (I remember developing an immediate fondness for the song “Negative Creep”), and dispatched a guy with a car to drive to a local record store to purchase tickets.

As you may have picked up on by now, this was before their breakthrough album Nevermind made them into megastars. They released that album four days before we saw them, and on the day before, the guy with the car acquired it on CD and we all listened to it. “Pretty good,” we thought. A bit more catchy than the songs on Bleach, especially that “Here we are now, entertain us” one.

I don’t think the show was sold out, but the band was clearly picking up enough buzz that a significant part of the crowd was there to hear Nirvana, goddamn it, and booed the opening band, the Melvins. The Melvins — a sort of drony, sludge-metal band, whose guitarist and singer was one of Kurt Cobain’s oldest friends — responded in classic punk-rock fuck-you style by closing their set with 20 minutes of unbearably loud feedback. (I imagine Cobain, backstage, loved this.)

Sadly, between the Melvins’ feedback and the onset of what would be turn out to be one of the worst flus I ever had, I developed a splitting headache just as Nirvana began their set. I remember Cobain coming on stage and announcing, “This is a song by the Vaselines,” and quite liking the song. (I think it was “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam,” which they later played on MTV Unplugged, but it might also have been “Molly’s Lips,” which they also covered regularly. I was not, at the time, familiar with the Vaselines’ catalog.) But by two or three songs in I was curled up on the floor in the very back of the club, desperate to do anything that might alleviate or at least lessen an unbearable pain that just wouldn’t go away.

Despite having bragging rights for having (sort of) seen Nirvana before they got big, I can’t say I ever became much of a Nirvana fan. As we sorted ourselves into different friend groups that first year, I drifted away from most of the folks I went to that show with. And while I made a few good friends at Sarah Lawrence, a couple of whom I am still in touch with, I never really found my place there, and transferred to Grinnell, in Iowa, after my sophomore year.

Grinnell has a not-undeserved reputation for widespread drug use and crazy behavior. However, it has nothing on Sarah Lawrence. (One of those people I hung out with in those first few weeks at SLC apparently spent her junior year just living in the Bronx shooting heroin.) So I sometimes joke that I am the only person who has ever arrived at Grinnell and found it conservative.

Which was, after two years of constantly being around hard drugs and hard partying, exactly what I was looking for. I was not only largely unaware of the release of Nirvana’s 1993 album In Utero, I was largely unaware of anything going on in the world of rock and roll. I mostly listened to folk and classical music, and taught myself how to sing well enough to do the singer-songwriter thing at the student-run coffeeshop, Bob’s Underground. I got absorbed in my classes, especially history and music composition, and began to think seriously about pursuing an academic career in one of those fields. I began dating an English major who played trombone in a brass quintet. She was a good influence on me: I rarely even drank that year, let alone do any drugs.1 Turns out, sex > drugs and rock and roll.

Cobain was 27 years old when he died — from the perspective of middle age, scarcely older than we were at the time. In 1992, just after his 25th birthday, he married fellow rock star Courtney Love but, um, they were not good influences on each other. They were such notorious heroin users that when their daughter was born in August the press asked if she was born addicted to the drug.

At various times, Cobain claimed that his heroin use was self-medication for the chronic and apparently unbearable stomach pain he suffered throughout his life. In 1991, he credited heroin as “the only thing that’s saving me from shooting myself right now.” His suicide — with a shotgun — came days after he broke himself out of a residential detox facility.

I spent the rest of that April evening with my girlfriend. I don’t remember exactly what we did. We probably walked around — I do remember it was a beautiful Iowa spring evening — and had tea and went to bed early, which is what we did on most weekend evenings. But I do remember her noticing that I seemed affected by the news of Cobain’s death. I was probably just as surprised about this as she was.

Sometime over the ensuing days a song came to me, while playing a simple and repetitive chord progression on my acoustic guitar. It was one of those rare songs that seems to just blow in on a gentle breeze and you write in like half an hour. The song didn’t have a chorus per se, but I sang the second half of each verse in a higher register. Imagining the song played by a full rock band, I orchestrated the change with the alternating quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamics that Nirvana stole from the Pixies. I also wrote a repeating ten-note guitar figure, probably inspired by the eight-note electric guitar figure that features prominently in Nirvana’s Unplugged cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.” (Incidentally, the first time MTV had allowed a band to use an electrified instrument on the show.) In my head, it was played by a piercing lead electric guitar, but for a long time I just fingered it on the high E and B strings of my acoustic as I strummed the chords, as it would be decades before I was in an actual rock band again.

The lyrics weren’t about Kurt Cobain so much as they were about the ways I saw other people reacting to his death, from the heartbroken notes in the student radio station to my floormate’s mockery.

Cobain had been anointed by the media as the voice of his generation, which was also my generation, our generation, “Gen X.” When he died, we were between 14 and 29. We had grown up under Reagan and Bush and, just as many of us were becoming adults, the economy tanked in the “Bush recession” of 1990-91, caused in part by the shock to oil prices from the first Iraq War. When we finally saw a Democrat elected (the older among us even getting a chance to vote for him), he turned out to be just another Republican, who gutted welfare, passed the North American Free Trade Agreement, bombed Kosovo and Somalia, and deregulated the telecom industry, leading to, among other things, even more consolidated corporate control of radio and the music industry.

We held that “selling out” was the greatest betrayal of personal integrity possible; we had grown up seeing icons of the 60s counterculture hawking nutritional supplements through multi-level marketing schemes and the Beatles’ “Revolution” used to sell Nikes. But it wasn’t clear what cause we had to sell out. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama told us we were living at “The End of History,” and when history is over, all you have left is the market. (This tension, by the way, is brilliantly captured in the 1999 documentary The Target Shoots First, made by a recent philosophy grad who, following Nirvana’s rise to fame, finds himself running the new “alternative” division at Columbia House, a mail-order CD company. The whole thing is available on YouTube.)

Like many of those previously anointed as “voices of their generation,” especially Bob Dylan, Cobain was clearly uncomfortable with the role. His message wasn’t revolution, but confusion. He felt, famously, “stupid and contagious.” He was easy to mock when he died, as were the people who felt bereft.

So I wrote a song about all that, and about growing up in what seemed, even back then, a crumbling nation, about covering our confusion with irony, about buying liquor for my younger friends after the death of a well-known addict.2 In the lyrics, I grabbed phrases from William Blake, from an old folk song Dylan had recently recorded, and from ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, whose militancy during the 1980s demanding a cure for the pandemic that was killing their community was probably the most vibrant challenge to that decade’s Reaganite consensus. An adaptation of their “Silence = Death” slogan became the title of the song, “Silence Kills.”

In a recent review of a memoir about unimaginable loss, makes an observation about the connection between confusion and grief:

The best part of this book is its understanding that mourning is, fundamentally, a type of confusion. We mourn in a state of bafflement. Grief has a way of befuddling us, which is inconvenient, given that we want our grief-stricken moments to mean something. And of course they do. But they mean something within the tangle of our petty misunderstandings, our grasping, our fundamental ridiculousness. And we sort of go on. I appreciate a book that’s honest about that, that there’s no greater meaning out there, beyond our decision to love each other.

Seven months after Cobain’s death, Sony Records released MTV Unplugged in New York as both a CD and a DVD. The final song on the album, and the final song during the performance it documents, is a harrowing rendition of an old folk song. Usually called “In the Pines,” it is titled “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on the Nirvana album and attributed by Cobain to the folk-blues singer Leadbelly, who recorded the song in the 1940s.

Versions of the song date back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and include both accusations of infidelity leveled at an unnamed “my girl” and accounts of the gruesome death of a railroad worker, whose “head was found in a driving wheel” and whose body was never found. Some emphasize one aspect more than another — Bill Monroe’s bluegrass version opens with “The longest train I ever saw / Went down that Georgia line” while Leadbelly’s opens with “Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me / Tell me, where did you sleep last night?” — but all share the imagery of being “in the pines, where the sun never shines,” of cold winds blowing and of the narrator, or perhaps the girl answering him, shivering through the night.

Cobain dispenses with almost all of the references to trains and railroads — if you didn’t know that a “driving wheel” is part of a train you would have no idea that the “hard-working man” whose head was found in one was a railroad man — and instead repeats over and over again the questions to “my girl,” about where she slept last night and where she will go, and her answer in the chorus:

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

Unlike when he sings his own lyrics, which he always tended to mumble, Cobain enunciates clearly, at least in the beginning of the song. As the song builds in intensity, you begin to wonder whether he is more concerned about his “girl” sleeping with another mortal man or about the possibility that she is up to something darker, like witchcraft. Cobain’s increasingly agitated voice, as he sings about the cold wind, the pines, and the shivering, develops an eldritch intensity that seems drawn from some ancient well of primordial terror.

On the final verse, his voice rises to a scream, but it is nothing like the way he screamed “I’m a negative creep and I’m STONED” on Bleach, full of rage and hormones and confusion. It is the cry of a haunted man, a man who can feel his humanity being drained from him. (Neil Young described it as “unearthly, like a werewolf.”) On the final “I’d shiver the whole night through,” as the band drops out, Cobain sounds barely human, like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, suffering unbearable pain, with no idea how to alleviate it, screaming into the black void of a world gone wrong.

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I finally recorded “Silence Kills” the way I always intended it, with thumping drums and loud electric guitars, in 2016, with my most recent band Secret Heliotropes. Our one album, A Well-Lit Room, is the only music of mine on Spotify, so I am sharing the song with you here as part of a playlist of Nirvana and Nirvana-adjacent music.

I sang and played the acoustic guitar, and I’m pretty sure I played that ten-note electric guitar figure in between the verses. My bandmdate Ted Looby played a rhythm electric guitar that’s kind of buried in the mix and two over-the-top guitar solos which are definitely not buried in the mix. (Seriously, you should listen to this on headphones to hear the way the feedback pans back and forth.) I don’t remember which of us played the bass. Our engineer at Low Tech Studio, Gus Ziesing, played the drums.

Like many, if not most, American children, I had endless fights with my parents when I was a child about EATING MY VEGETABLES.1

Now, of course, I love them. And ironically enough, one of the vegetables I particularly love cooking is the one vegetable my mother doesn’t like: beets. And since it is root vegetable season, and Substack has introduced a new(ish) recipe feature, I thought I would venture into food writing this week with a post about beets.

Although I recently wrote a whole post about eating a lot of beef in Kansas City while on vacation last fall, I don’t eat a lot of red meat in my day-to-day life

. One of the things I appreciate about beets is that they have both enough sugars to caramelize nicely and enough fiber to retain some firmness while they do (unlike, say, onions). This, together with their bright-red color, allows them to replicate certain of the gustatory and aesthetic pleasures of a carnivorous diet in ways which other meat substitutes just can’t match.

Many years ago, I read a New Yorker profile of René Redzepi, the famed chef of Noma in Copenhagen, at the time considered the best restaurant in the world. (Redzepi recently resigned, following accusations of widespread physical and psychological abuse at the restaurant — though such behavior is far from rare in the world of fine dining.) In the profile, Redzepi made the author some kind of root vegetable (a celeriac, if memory serves), cut in half and then pot-roasted — i.e., sautéed and then braised in a small amount of liquid in a covered pot.

Sometime thereafter, I began pot-roasting beets, and it has since become my favorite way to cook them. I just lop off the gnarly bits at the top and the bottom (there’s no need to peel them, especially if you get organic beets — just wash them well), slice them in half, season well with salt and pepper, and then slowly caramelize the cut sides in a generous amount of butter — about 15-20 minutes over medium-low heat.

After the cut sides are nicely browned, pull them out of the pot. If desired add some aromatics (onions, celery and carrots for a classic mirepoix; or onions, celery and green peppers if you want to go in a Cajun direction; garlic and ginger works really well too — whatever flavor profile you like) to the pot and sauté for the appropriate amount of time: 30-60 seconds if you’re just using garlic and/or ginger, 5-7 minutes for more substantial vegetables. Deglaze with a bit of wine (optional) and some stock or water, then return the beets to the pan, cover and simmer over low-medium heat until the beets reach your desired consistency. You should only have maybe a quarter to a third of an inch of liquid in the bottom of the pan; you want the beets to steam rather than boil. (But keep an eye on it, and add more water or stock if the liquid looks like it is going to boil off entirely.)

For medium-sized beets, like the ones pictured above, I find that 20-30 minutes of simmering gets them to a pleasantly toothsome consistency, firm enough that you need a steak knife to cut into them but still easy to chew. Reduce the sauce if it is watery, and if desired enrich with cream, sour cream, and/or butter. Fresh dill is also a nice addition, especially if you enrich the sauce with sour cream.

These are impressive enough to serve as the centerpiece of a meal, as you might a cut of meat — though of course they are relatively low in protein, which you’ll have to sneak in elsewhere in the meal.

Another recipe for beets that takes full advantage of their color, and that I am frequently asked for, is my recipe for Beat-Oat Burgers. It’s a bit labor-intensive, but is far and away the most burger-like vegetarian burger I have ever made — and it is beautifully red in the center, like rare beef. It’s also got a decent amount of protein and heft from the milk, oats, eggs and sunflower seeds. Pictured here with pepper jack cheese, on a bun with refrigerator zucchini pickles, caramelized onions and tomatoes, and a garbanzo bean, cucumber, tomato and parsley salad on the side.

For a while, you couldn’t throw a rock in a hip restaurant without hitting a beet-and-goat-cheese salad. It was perhaps one of the most cliché restaurant meals of the 90s and 2000s. But, I mean, it’s still pretty good. This version used some leftover pot-roasted beets, sunflower seeds, thinly-sliced Brussels sprouts, and cooked farro. It was delicious.

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After cooking, of course, one must do the dishes. Well, someone has to do the dishes. If you live alone, this task is easy to assign, but if you live with others it can quickly become contentious. This past week , who admits that “Over time after hearing about other people’s conflicts and dealing with my own, I have come to think much more seriously about dishwashing than any sane person should,” did a fantastic deep dive into why it is a uniquely contentious form of household labor:

If you, like me, have been a little overwhelmed by the news recently, maybe listening to this song from the early 80s, “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts,” will help. Also it will explain the title of this post. (I have not independently confirmed whether Woody Guthrie actually ever sang about root vegetables

, but even if he didn’t, I think the broader point still stands.)

Of course, as teenagers in Kansas in the late 1980s, we were hardly at much risk of sudden death in those intervals. If any of us were to die, it would probably be in one of those great American ways of death: car crash or gunshot.

But those were still quite unlikely, the result of individual bad luck. This was a decade before Columbine, so mass school shootings had not yet found their home in the American imaginary. And it was the era of glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall; with the Cold War ending, we were told, a golden era of worldwide peace and prosperity lay ahead.

Shortly after we broke up, in the middle of her senior year of high school and my “gap year,” President George H.W. Bush declared war on Iraq. The weekly peace vigils that I had been attending more or less regularly during the build-up to the war, when I wasn’t working a Sunday morning shift at my fast-food job, ballooned from dozens to hundreds of people. The demographics changed, too: it was younger, more working-class. I remember seeing one of my co-workers running down Massachusetts Street (the main street in my hometown) with some of his friends, decked out in heavy-metal mullets and denim jackets, chanting “No blood for oil!”

Despite our protests, the war went on and proved relatively popular. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S., aided by new technologies like satellite-based reconnaissance, GPS navigation, and precision-guided munitions, meant that fewer than 200 U.S. troops were killed. The ground war which drove the Iraqi military out of Kuwait, after a little over a month of aerial bombardment, lasted less than 100 hours.

Tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi soldiers were killed. U.S. planes dropped “fuel-air” bombs — which fill the air with aerosolized fuel then set it ablaze — on them as they fled from the front lines. Many of them were probably not much older than we were.

That first Gulf War, “Operation Desert Storm,” was waged in January and February of 1991. In April of that year, I would turn 18, and be legally required to register for the draft, Ronald Reagan having re-instituted mandatory draft registration in the early 80s.

I would often discuss this with my roommate, drummer, and songwriting partner J. As the country prepared for its first major military conflict since Vietnam, we had no idea what was coming, and we were anxious. J was a couple of years older than I was, so had already registered, reasoning that, rather than refusing mandatory military service outright, he would judge any individual war he might potentially be drafted for on its merits. However, this one definitely did not meet his personal criteria for a just war. If drafted, he had no intention of going, and neither did I. We had no concrete plans for how to resist, but we weren’t about to die — or, for that matter, kill — for oil company profits.

Patrick Wintour, the diplomatic editor at The Guardian, recently reviewed the recent history of U.S. wars in the Middle East. The first Gulf War, he writes, “at least had the advantage of being of a containable scope, purpose and duration,” with a “UN security council mandate to liberate Kuwait, but not invade Iraq” — a mandate that Bush Sr. respected.

But the war left a legacy, bringing

half a million US troops to the Middle East and, as Marc Lynch writes in his book The Ruination of a Region, those troops “in a symbolic sense, never went home, instead moving out into an archipelago of US bases across the Gulf, the Levant and southern Turkey designed to implement the dual containment of both Iraq and Iran”.

Those bases, now under attack by Iran, became “the infrastructural foundation of American primacy”.

What I remember most from the media coverage of the first Gulf War was the question of whether President Bush would be able to overcome “Vietnam syndrome,” the reluctance of the American people to support foreign military adventures in the wake of that conflict, which claimed almost 300,000 American lives and between one and three million Vietnamese lives. Posed during the build-up to the war, the question was answered solidly in the affirmative after its conclusion. No one talks about “Vietnam syndrome” any more.

Note: This section and the next include discussion of suicide, though largely from an abstract, epidemiological perspective.

Despite J’s and my fears, of course, the formal draft was never reinstated. Instead we got what is commonly called the “economic draft,” especially as plant closings and deindustrialization destroyed job prospects for young working-class people. While the military has occasionally voiced concern in recent years about the quality of its recruits (especially during periods of low unemployment), it has never really lacked for enough bodies to carry out its work, to fill, among other things, that archipelago of bases across the Middle East.

I recently listened to an episode of the podcast Ordinary Unhappiness in which their guest was Helen Epstein, a public health researcher and the author of Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic. Epstein’s research looks at times and places where suicide rates increased suddenly and massively — Micronesia after World War II, Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Inuit in contemporary Nunavut. The common thread in the examples she discussed most extensively on the podcast (I have not read the book) was the sudden loss of social cohesion as non-capitalist societies and cultures are thrust into an individualistic, capitalist way of being.

However, she also briefly mentioned another group: veterans of the second Gulf War, who experienced much higher rates of suicide than, say, Vietnam veterans. Apparently, post-traumatic stress disorder is vastly more likely to trigger suicidal feelings and action when it surfaces earlier traumas, unrelated to military service. Which would seem to imply that our economic draft had produced a military that is not only disproportionately made up of working-class people and people of color, but also disproportionately made up of people suffering from trauma, people more likely, if they survive the war, to die by suicide when they come home.

Decades after we dated — we have kept in touch, on and off — A was diagnosed with breast cancer, went through the agonizing process of chemotherapy, and wrote a book about it. I picked up a copy in the spring of 2021, shortly after getting my first Covid vaccine, when things like browsing the shelves of a bookstore were becoming possible again.

There is a section of the book in which she describes her raw, animal instinct to survive, to fight the cancer by any means possible, even if the treatments made her unbearably sick.

At the time that I was reading this, I was in the midst of a long period of depression. I was not at risk for suicide — I had, and have, firmly chosen to live — but I can’t say that I felt an especially strong will to live, that life could be something I would fight for. I felt at the time that Dar Williams had captured my situation perfectly in her song “After All”:

And when I chose to live
There was no joy it’s just a line I crossed
It wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found

On my worst days, I still feel this way (though rarely for more than a few hours).

I’ve never had my life directly threatened by cancer, or by bombs. I can imagine I would feel differently in that situation.

On the other hand, maybe it would just make things worse.

A’s usage never caught on in the late 80s, even among her immediate circle of friends in Kansas, but apparently it has come into vogue in Tehran recently. An anonymous Iranian citizen wrote for The Guardian, a week into the war that the U.S. and Israel have launched on that country:

A few days ago, I met a group of youngsters in a park overlooking Tehran. They had gathered to ease the weight they felt and talk things through, making jokes and bantering about the predicament they found themselves in. Perhaps we Iranians can find humour in any form of suffering, and can turn even misery into something to laugh about.

Their company eased some of the anxiety I carried with me. And as we were parting, one of them said, by way of goodbye: “Don’t die.”

The brutal nakedness of that sentence, its honesty, its immediacy, said everything about the conundrum we live in. About survival itself. Don’t expire. Stay alive.

Filed under: Personal History, Mental Health

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has a really good piece up this week, looking at antiwar movement strategy through the historical example of the movement against the Vietnam war. TL;DR version: mass action around clear and broadly-felt demands is effective; relying on liberal politicians or bloviating about your moral purism online is not.

Labor Politics

Ultraleftism Has Never Ended a War

With US-Israeli bombs continuing to fall on Iran and Lebanon, one might have expected American leftists to be focused on anti-war outreach in our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. The next No Kings protest is on March 28 and we have a great opportunity to lean on that to…

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6 months ago · 72 likes · 17 comments · Eric Blanc

Four years ago, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, I wrote about my memories of receiving a strange, fascinating, and morbid series of emails, purportedly leaked from Russian intelligence, during the second Gulf War: